On Wed, Aug 29, 2001 at 08:05:51AM -0700, Sean M. Doran wrote:
The global routing table size HAS grown exponentially in the past. Rationalize it any way you want, blame whatever you like, but there is no known way to construct a router that can handle that kind of growth in anything but a short term, and the trend for the components in the router growth curve is simply not going to increase to a long term superlinear rate.
Ah, but exponential growth can't happen forever, and we can build a system to handle the largest possible Internet (with v4, anyway). If you had a router that could handle 2^32 prefixes, it will handle the IPv4 Internet. Forever. The whole growth curve argument is gone. The global routing table cannot grow exponentially forever. There are upper bounds all around, including but not limited to the number of addresses. Over time the growth curve must change to be linear, and then logarithmic.. For reference, there are approximately 10^80 electrons in the universe (per several physics sources I found on the net). At doubling every year that gives us an absolute upper bound of 265 years, if every route could be stored in a single electron. Figuring we can probably only do one per atom, and averaging 4 electrons per atom (is that high or low?) that gives us 106 years. We're 30 years into this IP thing, roughly, so we're 1/3 of the way there. Not to minimze the short term issue, but to hand wave and say "it's exponential and we'll never get ahead of it" is crap. It won't be forever, so let's get ahead of it. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org Systems Engineer - Internetworking Engineer - CCIE 3440 Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request@tmbg.org, www.tmbg.org