North American Network Operators Group

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Re: IPv6 news

  • From: Mark Smith
  • Date: Sun Oct 16 03:28:58 2005

Hi Tony,

On Sat, 15 Oct 2005 23:26:20 -0700
Tony Li <[email protected]> wrote:

<snip>

  Perhaps  
> this is yet another case where people misunderstand the principle  
> itself and are invoking it to give a name to their (well placed)  
> architectural distaste.
> 

Doesn't NAT, or more specifically the most commonly used, NAPT, create
hard state within the network, which then makes it violate the
end-to-end argument ? Also, because it has to understand transport and
application layer protocols, to be able to translate embedded addresses,
doesn't this also make it violate end-to-end ? I've understood the
fundamental benefit of following the end-to-end argument is that you end
up with a application agnostic network, which therefore doesn't create
future constraints on which applications can then be used over that
network. In an end-to-end "compliant" network, any new transport layer
protocols, such as SCTP or DCCP, and new user applications, only require
an upgrade of the end or edge node software, which can be performed in
an incremental, per edge node as needed basis. In other words, there
isn't any whole of network upgrade cost or functionality deployment
delay to support new applications, which was the drawback of application
specific networks, such as the traditional POTS network.

Have I somehow misunderstood the intent or benefits of the end-to-end
argument ?

Thanks, Mark.

-- 

        The Internet's nature is peer to peer.