What is an advantage of a hierarchical name space over a flat name space for a

What is an advantage of a hierarchical name space over a
flat name space for a system the size of the Internet?
Internet?

Question Posted / tonya

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What is an advantage of a hierarchical name space over a flat name space for a system the size of ..

Answer / mohamed essam

As we will see in the next two topics, the architecture of
the name space is intimately related to how names are
registered and managed, and ultimately, how they are
resolved as well. A flat name space requires a central
authority of some sort to assign names to all devices in the
system to ensure uniqueness. A hierarchical name
architecture is ideally suited to a more distributed
registration scheme that allows many authorities to share in
the registration and administrative process.

All of this means that the advantages and disadvantages of
each of these architectures are not a great mystery. Flat
name spaces have the advantage of simplicity and the ability
to create short and easily remembered names, as shown in
Figure
232(http://www.tcpipguide.com/free/diagrams/namespaceflat.png).
However, they do not scale well to name systems containing
hundreds or thousands of machines, due to the difficulties
in ensuring each name is unique. For example, what happens
if there are four people named John who all try to name
their computers “John’s PC”? Another issue is the overhead
needed to centrally manage these names.

In contrast, hierarchical name spaces are more sophisticated
and flexible, because they allow names to be assigned using
a logical structure. We can name our machines using a
hierarchy that reflects our organization’s structure, for
example, and give authority to different parts of the
organization to manage parts of the name space. As long as
each department is named uniquely and that unique department
name is part of each machine name, we don’t need to worry
about each assigned name being unique across the entire
organization, only within the department. Thus we can have
four different machines named with their department name and
“John”, as Figure 233
(http://www.tcpipguide.com/free/diagrams/namespacehier.png)
demonstrates. The price of this flexibility is the need for
longer names and more complexity in name registration and
resolution.

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