I like this idea, and your argument about simplifying the forwarding plane makes sense. Should every edge node speak the EGP, or is be static from the NSP? My assumption is that they'll generally be static from the NSP, unless multihomed to keep from exchanging routing information about 2^32 prefixes. -ejay
-----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu] On Behalf Of Andre Oppermann Sent: Wednesday, February 15, 2006 2:42 PM To: Edward B. DREGER Cc: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: a radical proposal (Re: protocols that don't meet the need...)
Edward B. DREGER wrote:
CA> Date: Wed, 15 Feb 2006 14:04:24 -0600 CA> From: Chris Adams
CA> There's a difference: computers (routers) handle the
O(N^2) routing
CA> problem, while people would have to handle the O(N^2) cooperative AS CA> problem.
0.1 ^ 2 < 5000
One must also consider the scalar coefficient.
Err, the problem is not the number of AS numbers (other than having to move to 32bit ones). The 'problem' is the number of prefixes in the routing system. The control plane scales rather well and directly benefits from Moore's law. With todays CPU's there is no problem handling 2 million routes and AS numbers. Absolutely not.
Things get a bit more hairy with the forwarding plane though. The faster the link speed the less time it has per lookup and the larger the routing table the more routes it has to search in that
ever shrinking amount of time.
You see, saving on AS numbers is not really going to help much where it matters.
IMHO, and I have stated this before, the best way to handle the route issue is to hand out IPv6 /32 for multihoming and make it the routeable entity. Perfect matches in hardware are pretty easy to do for large numbers of them compared to longest match. On the plus side perfect match scales much better too and can be done in parallel or distributed within a routing chip. Doing the same for longest-match requires a lot more effort. With perfect-match having 2 million routes is not much of a problem too.
-- Andre