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Resource Coordination Objects: A State Distribution Mechanism DRAFT

Resource Coordination Objects (RCOs) provide a general mechanism for distributing information — state — among entities involved in distributed communications, both hosts and network nodes. They can be used to support application-, session-, and network-layer services, and can be used to coordinate auxiliary information about data flows with network routing. RCOs can be used as a general mechanism for incrementally adding services to networks. The RCO system includes both a transport protocol and a simple database mechanism. An API is also defined to provide local access to the RCO mechanism in an entity, allowing a client to store and access RCOs. Similar concepts are now appearing as application-layer services (e.g. Sun’s DOE), but these are oriented toward sharing data between end applications — there is no notion of sharing information between the application layer and the network layer in such systems. Our general approach is to develop near-term deployable IP versions of the RCO concept, so that the utility of the ideas can be assessed. We are also looking at the longer-term implications of the general concepts, to guide future work. This paper discusses the RCO concept in the abstract. A companion paper, “Resource Coordination Objects: Service Design,” describes a strawman implementation and discusses open issues in the design.