Bill,
Before anyone nods his way into a mistake, I'd ask you to consider a simple question: What might anycast look like in the various approaches we've discussed to solving the routing problem?
What you're proposing is certainly reasonable. The gist is that you don't end up with a global route per service, and that you use the mapping function to convert anycast into a unicast service.
Some folks do that already today (e.g., http://www.pool.ntp.org) with DNS as the mapping function. That's certainly fine and has no impact on routing whatsoever, obviously. We just don't call it anycast.
With this in mind, I propose a statement which is, on its face, absurd. Yet each time you consider it in the coming months and years, you'll find it makes more and more sense: Unicast is a special case of anycast in which there is only one destination endpoint.
Nothing absurd about it. It's been said many times that unicast is a special case of multicast and your observation is that anycast fits in the middle of that hierarchy, since anycast is also a special case of multicast where delivery is to only one receiver.
Regards, Tony _______________________________________________ rrg mailing list [email protected] http://www.irtf.org/mailman/listinfo/rrg
