From: Tim Bass <bass@linux.silkroad.com> Here is a very rough strawman idea just posted to the CIDRD-WG. ... Autonomous System Aggregation Protocol Without commenting on the technical details (I've always held that mapping from IPv4 addresses to something else is one way to provide routing that scales, as well as "portable" IPv4 "addresses"), let me just point out that this scheme requires a certain amount of protocol development and documentation, as well as implementation and deployment. As well all have seen, the Internet seems to have a hard time doing that in less than three years, flat out. Also, the CIDR RFC (RFC-1519, 1993, three years ago) explicitly says: the Internet ... is soon to face several serious scaling problems. These include: ... Growth of routing tables in Internet routers ... It has become clear that the first two of these problems are likely to become critical within the next one to three years. This memo attempts to deal with these problems by proposing a mechanism to slow the growth of the routing table In other words, the growth of the routing tables was seen as a problem even then, and CIDR (and "supernetting") was the solution that was proposed, in a timely fashion, to that problem. RFC-1519 goes on to note: The proposed solution is to topologically allocate future IP address assignment ... this plan neither requires nor assumes that already assigned addresses will be reassigned ... routing technology will be capable of dealing with the current routing table size and with some reasonably small rate of growth. If this was an unacceptable solution, the time to say so, and make alternate plans, was back then. We've put a lot of code in place assuming that this was going to be the way we solved this problem, and it's very late in the game to say "oops, not the right approach". Noel