Coalitions

Coalitions are how Sites and other Coalitions band together to form a heirarchy of network objects. These Coalitions are where the aggregation and abstraction of Nimrod occurs.

Coalitions must be made up of Sites and other Coalitions who can all communicate without going outside the Coalition. They would maintain a map of themselves and provide a map server service much like Sites do. It may turn out that Coalitions shouldn't be any different from Sites. For now though, I'll continue to talk about them separately and if they end up running identical protocols, good, we'll drop an extraneous networking object.

Each Site (probably in the form of some sort of Site agents, like the map servers or maybe the border routers) needs to know any Coalitions the Site is in and keep routes to the Coalition's Agents.

Border routers in a Site that's part of a coalition need to know about their coalition membership so if they're handed a path specification that's in terms of the Coalition's map, they understand how to set-up the desired flow state.

Whoever maintains an endpoint's route information in the name system, may use Site or Coalition map points in the routes it maintains.

As far as I can see, there's no reason why a Site can't belong to multiple Coalitions but I haven't though this idea through yet. In fact, I think it'll be a political requirement that Sites may be in multiple Coalitions.