Wolfgang Henke: Wednesday, May 17, 2000 10:16 AM
This suggests a generally flatter architecture, maybe parallel. Still remember the supercomputer discussions a few years back when experts argued if either KSR or Thinking Machines is going to be *the* big win?
And today when you need a lot of processing e.g. for rendering, you simply stick a couple dozen Pentiums on a fast switched ethernet.
What you are suggesting here is some form of distributed routing process. The current problem is that all the router protocols store all their data in talbes and they ALL have near identicle copies of these tables. BGP is simply a synchronization mechanism. In fact, all the routing protocols can be viewed as simple synchronization mechanisms. Re-architecting that structure is not going to be simple and could probably be the basis of an IETF working group. If the IAB could ever get off their political duff (and back to real work), maybe they could lead such an effort. These days, the IAB is too busy making political pronouncements that have nothing to do with internet architecture. Inertia is great/huge and that job is probably not do-able. Us mercenary commercial architects are not going to do it for free either.