On Mon, Nov 08, 2010 at 03:56:17PM +0000, Tony Finch wrote:
I note that he doesn't actually describe how to implement a large-scale addressing and routing architecture. It's all handwaving.
I'm probably vying for nanog-kook status as well, but in high-dimensional spaces blocking is arbitrarily improbable. Think of higher-dimensional analogs of 3d-Bresenham (which is local-knowledge only), then blow away most of the links. It still works. You have to wire the network appropriately to loosely follow geography (which is of course currently a show-stopper) and label the nodes appropriately -- as a bonus, you can derive node ID by mutual iterative refinement, pretty much like relativistic time of flight mutual "triangulation". Another issue is purely photonic cut-through at very high data rates: there's not that much time to do a routing decision even if your packet stuck in molasses as slow light or circulating in a fiber loop FIFO. So not only are photonic gates expensive (and conversion to electronics and back is right out), you might not stack too many individual gate delays on top of each other. Networks are much too smart still, what you need is the barest decoration upon the raw physics of this universe.
And he seems to think that core routers can cope with per-flow state.
The only bits he's at all concrete about are the transport protocol, which isn't really where the unsolved problems are.