Hi Aijun, > 1. The size of network is increasing, but it is becoming more flat. Is it the > right direction to make the network more hierarchical?
Well, given that we’re talking a link state protocol running SPF over a database in O(n log n) time, it’s pretty clear that we don’t want to scale the size of an area indefinitely. While modern processors are amazing (especially to those of us that started off with KHz 8080’s), it’s pretty clear that Moore’s law is over and that we cannot expect infinite compute power anytime in the future. The alternative is to partition the network in some way. Once partitioned, hierarchical arrangement seems like a natural fit. It’s been said that the only real tool that we have over scale is hierarchy. Divide and conquer. > 2. More hierarchical network means the traffic will also be traversed in > hierarchical way, is it more efficient? The hierarchical arrangement of the control plane does NOT imply that the data plane is necessarily hierarchical. > 3. Is there any other methods to scale out the IS-IS deployment? If you’ve been following along, Dynamic Flooding (https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-lsr-dynamic-flooding-03 <https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-lsr-dynamic-flooding-03>) allows us to address the limitations that we have with flooding, allowing us to scale the size of an area. However, it does not address the O(n log n) cost of SPF that will still ultimately bound the growth of areas and in turn necessitate more hierarchy. Regards, Tony
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