[ih] Overlay networks

[Lawrence Stewart]

Thanks all for the historical examples, I think the X-bone is closest to what I was asking about.
I was already familiar with encapsulation, I did some of that myself in 1978, passing PARC PUP traffic inside IP datagrams on the Packet Radio network.

By “overlay” I was trying to get at the idea not of connecting the base network into some larger internetwork, but of using point to point connections on the base networks as links in an upper level network which covers the same endpoints but with different topologies or characteristics, such as message aggregation, or network coding, or fault tolerance.

-L