Re: [grobj] Referral definition and its purpose?

[Dong Zhang <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

Sheng Jiang 2010-05-19 Wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Keith Moore [mailto:[e-mail]] 
>> Sent: Tuesday, May 18, 2010 8:27 PM
>> To: Sheng Jiang
>> Cc: [e-mail]
>> Subject: Re: [grobj] Referral definition and its purpose?
>> 
>> On 5/18/10 5:01 AM, Sheng Jiang wrote: 
>> 
>> 	Hi, all,
>> 	
>> 	We are now working on an referral PS draft, targeting 
>> to submit end of May
>> 	or the beginning of June. We'd like to discuss the 
>> relevant contents/topic
>> 	publicly in the mail list during our writing. Comments 
>> or contributions are
>> 	more than welcome.
>> 	
>> 	The first target is to understand what is referral and 
>> its purpose. There
>> 	may be different understanding, our goal here is to 
>> find a common definition
>> 	for our PS draft. The following is my understanding and 
>> what's in the draft
>> 	now.
>> 	
>> 	In abstract: The purpose of a referral is to enable a 
>> given entity in a
>> 	multiparty Internet application to pass information to 
>> another party. It
>> 	enables a communication initiator to aware relevant 
>> information of its
>> 	destination entity before launching the communication.
>> 	
>> 	In the introduction: A frequently occurring situation 
>> is that one entity A
>> 	connected to the Internet (or to some private network 
>> using the Internet
>> 	protocol suite) needs to inform another entity B how to 
>> reach either A
>> 	itself or some third-party entity C. This is known as a 
>> referral.
>> 	
>> 	Does everyone can agree on this Referral definition and 
>> its purpose? Only if
>> 	consensus can reach here, our next discussion for 
>> referral scenarios can
>> 	make sense.
>> 	
>> 
>> I would define the scope as somewhat broader than that.  I 
>> think it's quite reasonable to want to make referrals across 
>> application boundaries.  If one application provides a 
>> service that's useful to another application, I think it's 
>> reasonable to pass a referral object from one application to 
>> another.    To say this another way, I think that these days 
>> the boundary between one application and another is rather arbitrary.
>
>Hi, Keith,
>
>Fully agree. The approach we are discussing is application independent. So, natually, the solution
>we may produce will have the ability to traverse application boundaries. My ideal model is the
>referral will happen in transport layer to serve all applications. 
Why not in IP layer? I mean using the extension header, such as destination options header.

Thanks.
------------------				 
Dong Zhang
2010-05-19