Glossary

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Whatevercast

A proposed RINA concept that maps a RINA name to a set of destination names and/or addresses. It purports to "unify unicast and multicast", based on the observation that communication in a network of N nodes is in general n-to-m, and unicast is just the case where n=m=1, and broadcast the case where m=N-1. We found this concept to be deceiving; 1:1 multicast is distinct from unicast. The proposed API is allocate(whatevercastname) and the network will resolve things for you because the 'whatevercast name' has a set of rules associated with it to resolve the destination addresses. Unicast names and Multicast names may look similar, but have to be different classes of names to make this work. See Ouroboros multicast conjecture.