Network compartment

Network Compartments implement the operational rules and administrative policies for a given communication context.

The complexity and details of the internal operation is left to each compartment.

For example, registration with a compartment can range from complex trust-based mechanisms to simple registration schemes with a central database or a public DHT-based system; resolution of a communication peer can be handled implicitly by the compartment's naming and addressing scheme or require explicit actions (e.g., resolution of an identifier to a locator).

Note that the above definition does not specify whether a member is a node, a set of servers or a software module.

This rather abstract definition of compartment membership permits to capture many different flavours of members and communication forms.