links on the blink (fwd)
Michael Dillon
michael at memra.com
Thu Nov 9 07:53:35 UTC 1995
On Wed, 8 Nov 1995, Dennis Ferguson wrote:
> to be a bleak prospect. There comes a point where you just run out of
> router bandwidth, and nothing but more router bandwidth is going to fix
> it, but the bigger bandwidth boxes are no where to be found.
Are you sure that creative ways of using lots of smaller T3 bandwidth
boxes couldn't solve the problem?
If we assume that bandwidth on the lines is not a problem (no shortages)
and that T3 routers with smaller routing tables could make effective use
of the bandwidth, then is it possible to do the following?
In Hypothetica, PA are ABC ISP who has a T1 to Sprint and XYZ ISP who has
a line to MCI. Both have so-called portable addresses from the swamp and
thus consume space in the core routing tables. This means that traffic
from ABC to XYZ travels from Hypothetica to Pennsauken, thence to MCI and
back to Hypothetica. However, suppose we clean up the swamp by simply
removing it entirely from all the core routing tables. What then? Every
provider puts a default route in each core router. This default route
points to a special router whose job is to just deal with the swamp
routes and nothing else. In effect we are partitioning the routing tables
in two. Under this regimen packets from ABC to XYZ travel to Pennsauken,
then follow the default to Fort Worth and thence to Chicago where the
swamp router lives. The swamp router uses a separate continental backbone
to route the traffic back to Fort Worth, back to Pensauken and thence to
MCI where the traffic takes a similar circuitous route before reaching
Hypothetica.
Seems terribly wasteful of bandwidth doesn't it? But if something like
this can help prevent routers from flapping and if bandwidth is
avaialbale, perhaps it could work. If the parallel lines carrying "swamp"
traffic are of lower bandwidth than the main lines and suffer congestion,
then I suppose ABC could simply renumber to be within Sprint's aggregate
and be back on the mainline.
In fact, if this really is a viable technical solution, perhaps the
threat of deployment would cause a rush of renumbering and make it easier
for NSP's to just say no to swamp addresses.
> seem to be anything to spend the money on which is clearly going to fix
> anything. I don't think this is a happy state to be in, in fact it sucks,
If you are right, then yes it sucks. Obvoiusly the ATM and OC3
technologies are right where you have pegged them, but what about
parallelism using existing DS3 technology? And if this is done, are there
mux/demux boxes that can handle DS3's<->OC3 ?
> profit motives. I think we're victims of our having own success creep up
> to and pass the technology when we weren't paying close enough attention,
> and the only thing left to do seems to be to try to play catch-up from
> a position of increasing disadvantage.
One nice side effect is that this may force the video-on-demand folks off
the Internet and into straight ATM instead. I rather like the future
scenario where the globe is girdled by an IPng data network and a separate
parallel video/ATM network.
Michael Dillon Voice: +1-604-546-8022
Memra Software Inc. Fax: +1-604-542-4130
http://www.memra.com E-mail: michael at memra.com
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