Christian, thanks for waking us up.

Christian Vogt wrote:
> In fact, I see only two 
> purposes for which the Internet architecture must have identifiers:
> 
> (1) service identification, identifying a piece of communication
>      software that responds to incoming contact establishment attempts

Service identification denotes a type of activity that a node would perform for 
a node. For example, check the time and return a timestamp. The activity is 
checking and returning, and when it is performed multiple times, those are 
distinct activities of the same type. Identified is the particular type of 
activity among all that a node would perform.

> (2) session identification, identifying the protocol state corresponding
>      to a particular session after contact establishment

Do you mean connection identification?

> Individual Internet architecture solutions may use combinations of more
> than one identifier for either of these two purposes.  For example,
> service identification in the existing Internet is achieved by combining
> a host identifier (DNS name, or IP address in its role as a host
> identifier) and a host-local service identifier (well-known port
> number).

Since the port number is well-known, the service identifier is not just 
host-local, but is meaningful to any host, that is, it is global.
And the combination with host identifier is service localization.

> So an Internet architecture may have more than two types of 
> identifiers.  But again, it seems that all of those identifiers would
> serve only the above two purposes, after all.

There exists node-local identification of connection instances, currently the 
socket "port". It serves the purpose of connection identification.

Agree?

Toni
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