[Ndn-interest] In-network name discovery -- Re: NDN protocol principles: no privacy?

[Ignacio.Solis at parc.com]

On 3/16/16, 11:08 PM, "Tai-Lin Chu" <tailinchu at gmail.com> wrote:



>>  Without some deterministic globally-agreed matching algorithm, each subsequent request for a name could return something longer or shorter and the only way to converge onto a useful name
>
>If you already think of a name, I agree that ndn current in-network discovery will not be useful to find the same one. But I don’t understand why you try to do it; the point of discovery service is to discover unknown names. It is fine as long as the data packet returned satisfies the interest. I don’t think it is the case that I will never know what I will get; it just means I did not specify the right constraints.

If you don’t have enough information (constraints or not) to specify what you want, what makes you think that the network is going to know or get the right thing?  It seems to me all you are doing is exploring the network, randomly walking a graph.

>> While this is a highly imperfect analogy, the fact that IP today does not work in any practically useful way without DNS, I think it’s just fine for NDN (or CCN) to not work without a universally available discovery protocol built on top. From a implementation efficiency and simplicity point of view, if a very small volume of the communications need the discovery features, we can avoid some very expensive mechanisms in the forwarding path of the NDN routers.
>
>I am also satisfied if this results in efficiency and simplicity from “application" point of view (no alternative l3 protocol, and faster discovery process). It is also important that there will be one common discovery protocol (DNS analogy).

Nobody is proposing an alternative layer 3 protocol.  We are proposing to have a separate discovery protocol that is not built into layer 3.  

The single discovery protocol is not as important as you think. We have many layers, applications, services and uses and they all have different mechanisms for discovery.  Discovering the peers in the network attached to a shared channel is different than discovering the available virtual machine instances ready to run a task.  Or where you talking about a single discovery protocol at a specific layer?

The discovery protocol in an ad-hoc mobile network can be much different than of a centralized datacenter.  I don’t rule a single protocol out, but I’m not ready to claim that is the solution.

Nacho