[e2e] flat (was Re: Port numbers in the network layer?

[christian.tschudin@unibas.ch]

On Fri, 26 Apr 2013, Detlef Bosau wrote:

> ... port numbers on the transport layer have worked fine for about 35 
> years now. (Is this correct?) So there must be extremely compelling 
> reasons to restart this discussion.

the past not being the reason, the reason must lie in the future,
which is: no ports at all, and names instead of port numbers.

If at Bob's time ports were chosen to be encoded in ASCIZ instead
of a 16 bit integer, many nice conflations would have been possible,
architectural IP oddities cleaned up, connectionless web servers
at IP level could have emerged and the bang path would still be
with us.

Some fun addr+"port" examples for such a one-layer IP network:

10.0.0.1:ping?reply-to=my_asciz_name_instead_of_port_here
10.0.0.2:echo?say=look at me look at me I'm on e2e
127.0.0.1:/index.html
0.0.0.0:arp?who-has=192.168.1.1&tell=eth(27:18:28:18:28:45):me
192.168.1.1:dns?www.google.com&t=mx
192.168.1.1:!my:path!to:the!open:dns?holy.cow
192.168.1.1:eval(dns?www.google.com)!i_feel_lucky?but I forgot the question

Port-less is not really new and links back to Bob: it's an instance
of a role based architecture, makes the world look flat again,
like SDN.

best, christian

---
Prof. Dr. Christian F. Tschudin
Uni Basel | Head of Dept of Mathematics and Computer Science