Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!jarthur!ucivax!gateway
From: Stef@nrtc.northrop.COM (Einar Stefferud)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.iso.x400
Subject: Re: sugestion for MS thesis solicited
Message-ID: <16453.647756169@nma.com>
Date: 12 Jul 90 04:42:32 GMT
Reply-To: Stef@nrtc.northrop.COM
Lines: 40
Approved: usenet@ICS.UCI.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of Wed, 11 Jul 90 16:21:54 -0400.
             <9007112021.AA00271@neptune.mitre.org>

Hello Liane -- I suspect that you are looking for a more general toic
thatn the ones identified by Kit Leuder, so here are some other
observations.

First, it is clear from looking at the overall routing question that a
realy useful MTA is going to have to be much more sophiticated than most
of the current crop which like to only route on a subset of the standard
attributes of ORAddresses, and whcih act like it is a sin to pay any
attention to a DDA.

The bottom line is that the winning implementation is going to have to
pay full attention to all the relevant facotrs in routing and allow for
very sophisticated rules to be tabled and applied.  Every available
per-user attribute with a value should be legitimately used to form keys
to routing tables.  For example (as Kit mentioned) conversion is a
factor and so conversion (requested/prohibited/etc) information in P1
must be usefully employed.  So must DDA values and anything else.

It is likely that accouting (billing) information should be considered,
else a PRMD operator will have no way to engage in what I call "Bill
Control" in whych the PRMD operator sets routing tables to minimize the
bills for transferring mail.

Also, it is legitimate for multinatrional organizations (NATO comes t
mind) will want to form Relaying PRMDs to transfer mail among unitns in
different countries without handing mail over to an ADMD, so they will
have to route on non-ADMD attriburtes, regardless of what ADMD names in
in an ORaddress.

So, I simply suggest that your student take as a project the effort to
collect all the relevant attributes and values from P1 envelopes and
develop ways to use expert system rules to deduce routes from what I
would call "complex routing keys" that would be made up of an enriched
set of ORAddress attributes and values.

The project should also work on ways to cache routes that have been
deduced in such a way as to speed recognition of repeated complex keys,
and extraction of the resulting route determinations.

Cheers...\Stef