Sean M. Doran wrote:
If all of these assumptions prove to be invalid, and in particular if it is cheaper to build equipment which are better at switching very small amounts of data across many diverse physical paths,
The cost of building a 1 Tbps/line signle data path router at the present level of technology: infinity. Everything is cheaper than that :)
if a routing scheme that can fully exploit this can be developed,
There's no need for L3 routing to be aware of multiplicity of physical paths underneath.
and if it is more economical to use many small pipes than a few large pipes,
For some reason i doubt it. The general rule -- use transmission technology presently at the bottom of price/performance @ performance curve; and replicate it accordingly to reach desireable performance level.
then obviously one would be better off not aggregating traffic, and perhaps even deaggregating it and its complementary reachability information.
You can have deaggregated traffic and still keep aggregated reacheability information, as long as you constrain topologies to multiple-parallel-links in otherwise small general graph. There are no routing technologies which wouild scale for large general graphs, to my knowledge. --vadim