(IPng 5000) Re: Last Call: IP Version 6 Addressing Architecture to Proposed Standard

bill,  

i'm surprised by your remark.
i thought you have been around long enough to understand this.
we've been over all this before.

	
	the problem is not now, nor has it ever been,
	the size of the forwarding table  measured in any unit -
	routes, bytes, feet, or kilograms.

(yes, there have been a few episodes where gross inadequacies of popular
hardware created *serious* tactical headaches, but don't confuse that
with the underlying problem.)

the fundamental problem is the complexity of the computation which produces
the forwarding table from many, many of copies various subsets of the
global routing information.

the complexity of that computation is driven by two things - 
the cardinality of the set of visible nodes in the global topology graph,
and the complexity of the topology connecting those nodes.  
(note that "node" here does not imply a router but whole networks).

of these two things, we cannot readily control the edge topology of the
graph, so we are only left with controlling the cardinality of the node set of
the graph if we wish to influence that complexity.

of course, you can argue that we don't need to care about the problem - 
that somehow processors will keep getting fast enough fast enough to
retain reasonable convergence times.

but then you are betting on a race between two exponentials -
and are making the bet that the smaller exponent will win.    

i know *i* don't want to wager the future on that bet.

	-mo