[alto] [ALTO] Comments on [draft-stiemerling-alto-info-redist-00]

["Y.J. Gu" <[e-mail]>]

I'm very glad that at last someone notice redistribution.

I'm not totally agree with some opinions in the draft.

--  "However, there is no mean for the peers to verify whether the
information provided is actually intended
   for their usage nor if the information is actually accurate at their
current topological position in the Internet "

Surely, it's very important to verify the usage and the origination of the
redistributed information.
I don't think accurate information needs to be redistributed.
Actually, there are kinds of general information that are suitable and
helpful to be redistributed.
E.g. kinds of cost between a particular PID and other PIDs is useful to all
the peers in the particular PID. 
What we should do is to guarantee that general information is redistributed
within the PID area(maybe multicast) or to guarantee that peer only request
its PID general information.

---"First of all does this require public/private key pair, where the public
key is known to each peer and a trusted third party is required.  These
requirements are possible to be fulfilled in certain deployments but are not
in the general Internet deployment case, which in turn limits the
applicability of this protocol.  Second, the receiving peer needs to contact
the ALTO server at least once to obtain the public key part, or it does need
to contact another server that provides the public key pair."

First, Redistribution can be an optional part of the protocol, ALTO server
can decide whether redistribution is adopted according to internet
environment. Second, peer can contact CA, instead of ALTO server, to obtain
a public key. In P2PSIP-reload, each peer owns a certificate and every peer
can contact the CA to authenticate the certificate of other peer. Reload
regards this an acceptable workload to CA. I think the frequence of
obtaining public key from ALTO server is much fewer than the authentication
in Reload. So that may be not a probolem.
Whatever, the real workload depends on how we design the redistribution
mechanism. 



Regards

Yingjie Gu