And Now for Something Completely Different (was Re: IPv6 news)

Mon Oct 17 19:03:45 UTC 2005

> Imagine a situation with no access to any means of direct communication
> (phone etc). You've got a message to deliver to some person, and have no
> idea where to find that person. Chances are there's a group of people
> nearby you can ask. They may know how to find the one you're looking
> for. If not they may know others they can ask on your behalf. Several
> iterations later the person is located and you've established a path
> through which you can pass the information you wanted.
> 
> Translated into cisco terms this mean that the FIB is just a partial
> routing database, enough to start the search and otherwise handle
> communications in the neighborhood (no more than X router-hops, maybe
> AS-hops away). When the destination is located you keep that information
> for a while in case there are more packets going to the same place,
> similar to what you do with traditional route-cache.

check out "The Landmark Hierarchy: A New Hierarchy for Routing in Very Large
Networks"; Paul Tsuchiya; 1989.

randy