Sue: Lots of companies require electricity and phone service in order to conduct their business. Given the comparatively small number of companies that have phone lines served by more than one central office or redundant power feeds to their buildings (much less lines provided by more than one phone company or more than one power company), I little evidence to suggest that there will be a huge growth in the number of multi-homed networks in the near future. Your last paragraph is most telling, however. We are looking at this situation from two different angles. While you are designing the next generation of routing protocols, my compatriots and I are discussing how to reasonably configure the hardware we've already got with existing protocols in order to keep the poor CPUs in boxes that carry full routing from melting down due to route flap. Neither task is inherently better or more honorable than the other, but it is important to not let the purposes become crossed. When the futurists are permitted to interfere with the here-and-now pragmatists, what happens is called OSI. When you let the here-and-now pragmatists interfere with the vision of the futurists, you get the phone company and cable TV. I am quite interested to see a copy of your paper; please send it (or a pointer) along. IDRP may be wonderful, but it is not likely to make the CPUs in ICM's routers sit down and take a rest in the near term. Pull-up routes to reduce flap are a cheap, easy-to-install, and rapidly deployable (though not technologically beautiful) way to do that, and should be deployed with all reasonable haste (in my biased opinion). Best regards, ---Rob
Rob:
During the Development of the IDRP specification, there we discussion about how to automatically generate from the IGP information, the information necessary to send in BGP/IDRP. Have you read the paper by Yakov, Dave Oran, and myself on this? It was written a while ago. I can send you a copy.
The single core corporate, with single homed may be currently a winner - due to security and ease of access. However, it may be that the future, will require more redundancy for certain businesses who use the Internet to sell services.
At that point multi-homed corporate networks may grow out of the 5%. The multi-homed network prefixes, could be generated form IGP information.
Please don't take this as a should, but a thoughtful response on what "might" be.
Best wishes,
Sue Hares