| 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. Sure, just about anybody can build a router which has 2**32 forwarding directives burned into ROM. It gets easier with fewer interfaces, too. But, who wants a static network? In the early 90s we had a network where you could wait a week before the core of the Internet adapted to your topology change, and changed its routing towards a particular prefix. It wasn't really much fun. So, even though I convert (x/2)² into x/2 in what passes for my head, I think that it's pretty clear that the problem isn't the state at any given moment, but rather the rate of change of that state. | The global routing table cannot grow exponentially forever. And neither can the rate of change. The problem only has to be Too Hard to compute affordably, not NP-complete. (I bet others are already explaining this later in my $MAIL, but I seem to be stuck on doing things linearly today...) | For reference, there are approximately 10^80 electrons in the | universe (per several physics sources I found on the net). Oh cool, particle physics. How many degrees of freedom do these electrons have? Interesting point: a prefix in the global routing table CAN have one or more moments of inertia. Maybe something multilevel is even better. Something like following the contributions of constituent quark spin to a hadron or nucleon or would certainly be even more appropriate, since indeed an IGP perturbation can lead to fluctuation at the EGP (i.e. BGP) level, causing announcements to rotate about a set of interfaces. I bet Ahuja & Labowitz have even recorded this happening. Hey maybe there is some deep irony at work in that one can analogize the work of Dyson Sr (QED, QCD) and Jr (ICANN) in this way... | 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. There's lots of irony in that too. Other than the hand-wave, how do you propose to get (and stay) ahead of it? Sean.