The real problem

Scott Huddle huddle at mci.net
Sun Mar 2 22:03:36 UTC 1997


Mike,

If I follow your observation, routing computation growth is
non-linearly related to number of routes.  Or is it
orthogonal?  If the growth is related to the announcement,
this infers that costs incurred for the announcement of routes by 
ISP FOO to ISP BAR would be non-linear with the quantity,
correct?  

If those costs are non-zero, then BAR needs to be compensated
by FOO for the announcement.  One way for BAR to recoup its 
costs would be for it to collect a payment from FOO.  Thus
FOO "buys" a routing slot from BAR.  From your observation, 
these payments may be non-linear related to quantity.  Note
that BAR may owe a similar payment to FOO for consumption
of the same resources on FOO's network.  Without the payments  
you have market failure -- consumption of the resource
is unchecked ("tragedy of the commons") and people who "want" 
or "need" to make a route announcement, and who *could pay*
for the resources that they consume, cannot do so.  

Thus the REAL problem is that we don't have markets for
the determination and allocation of these scarce resources
whether you call them "routing slots" or "routing complexity".

Redirected to piara.

-scott


At 12:09 PM 3/2/97 -0500, Mike O'Dell wrote:
>
>Yet again people keep talking about "the size of the routing tables"
>as being the deep problem, and this makes people say  silly things
>like "FOO is protecting router memory".
>
>Thinking about it this way is funamentally and fatally incorrect.
>
>The REAL problem is the growing complexity of the ROUTING COMPUTATION,
>not the size of the resulting forwarding table.  even if routers
>had infinite memory, we would still be crushed by the routing
>computation if allowed to grow unchecked.
>
>	-mo
>
>





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