On Wednesday 25 February 2015 14:02:47 Kesavan, Vijay S wrote:
> We support global discovery (all interfaces, all transports) and host
> discovery (specific host on a specified transport - requires identification
> information for that host eg. IP addr or MAC addr).  Interface discovery
> itself might have sub-scenarios and the following ones are currently
> supported:
> 
> 1. Discover resources based on specific transport type - example WiFi,
> Ethernet, BT, BLE.  Note for IP interfaces user has the option of selecting
> Ethernet vs WiFi. 

I've asked this before: why is there a distinction between Ethernet and WiFi? 
What is the use-case for the user where she needs to care?

> 2. Discover resources across hosts on a specific
> transport type - for IP interfaces it is possible to discovery on the
> well-known multicast address

No application should ever have to write multicast addresses in the source 
code. 

The only use-case that I can think of for using a muticast address that is not 
the default is when there's a separate group, outside of the main one. I 
expect this to be extremely rare, so please make the easy API not require a 
multicast address. In fact, we could go as far as dropping the feature of 
specifying the multicast address until there's need for it.

> What is not supported is selecting the specific interface based on transport
> type.  For example, if there are two WiFi interfaces on the platform, it is
> not possible to specify which WiFi interface to use.

That has to change.

If I have two IP-based connections, there's no a priori reason why one is more 
preferable than than the other. So if I can select one, I should be able to 
select the other too.

I am actually questioning the selection based on transport type. That should 
be scrapped and replaced with interface-based selection and functionality to 
enumerate the interfaces. At most, we could provide functionality to exclude 
certain types of transports from the default search (GPRS/3G/4G, point-to-
point, etc.).

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Software Architect - Intel Open Source Technology Center

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