Re: controversial paper

From: Mxsmanic (mxsmanic_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 09/30/03 

Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2003 10:33:17 +0200

Mok-Kong Shen writes:

> The trouble is you would have to have one central place for
> issuing the required number in order to avoid duplicates.

Not necessarily. You could have n servers, each of which serves up only
every nth address in sequence. Periodically (daily, monthly, whatever),
you could verify that the address space is being completely filled, and
make any necessary adjustments. As long as requests are evenly
distributed across the servers, the net effect would be to assign
addresses sequentially, and yet no central control point would be
necessary.

> One needs decentralization, meaning that at each level
> you have to have certain reserves in the address space
> and at no time there is any consecutive part of the address
> space that is fully (compactly) utilized (something you
> desire, if I don't err).

See above. You could assign eight servers or 128 servers, as required.
The only constraint over time is that the address space be fully
utilized, with no reserved but unused areas.

> I think that the following analogy could be relevant in
> some sense here: In programming for certain kinds of tasks,
> one could either employ a large array that is only sparsely
> occupied or employ a linked list that has all the entries
> containing user data compactly stored together. Convenience,
> if not also efficiency, considerations normally lead to the
> employment of the first kind of data structure.

Yes. Either way, you fill the address space sequentially, in time.

However, if you artificially constrain the use of the address space,
there are large portions of it that will never be filled, and at the
same time there will be portions of it that do not have enough addresses
available for the intended purpose.

It's important to realize that if you divided a 2^n address space into
two fields of sizes 2^m and 2^p, you don't end up with 2^n/2 addresses,
you end up with only about 2^m or 2^p addresses (whichever is greater).
This is an _enormous_ reduction, no matter how you divide things up. 

-- 
Transpose hotmail and mxsmanic in my e-mail address to reach me directly.

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