[e2e] Fwd: Camel's nose in the tent

[David P. Reed]

At 09:11 AM 8/13/01 +0100, Graham Cope wrote:
>My favourite is the somewhat glib statement used by some people
>'intelligence is moving to the edge of the network'. I have three
>problems with that statement:
>1/ What is intelligence?
>2/ What and where is an edge?
>3/ What is a network? E.g., tunneling through, confusion between a
>service and a network (what is the PSTN?, or in this case, what is an
>e-mail network), virtual network, overlay (underlay?) networks etc.

It's glib, but no more so than many sensible statements.  Since you ask:

1/ Intelligence is computational decision-making on the behalf of users or 
intentionally allied groups of users.  (e.g. error recovery involves 
decisions on behalf of users, as does security, as does "quality of 
service" in its many guises, as does "fair resource allocation").

2/ Edges are the areas or functional components of the network under more 
direct control of individual users or intentionally allied groups of users. 
(e.g. computers under the users' control, applications, etc. as opposed to 
shared facilities operated by third parties that are not owned or 
controlled by individual users or allied groups).

3/ A network is an interconnection scheme that facilitates communications 
among users or intentionally allied groups of users.  (e.g. the IPv4 
transport interconnection commonly called the Internet, or the HTTP 
transport interconnection commonly called the Internet - different 
abstraction, same name -, the telephony service network commonly called the 
international telephone service or POTS).

That this set of definitions has terms that can be bound at different 
levels of abstraction is a feature - because there is much that can be said 
about design principles that is independent of binding of the definitions.






- David
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