Traffic locality and other questions

Thu Sep 25 21:31:02 UTC 1997

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