Gang, Lately my student Hitesh Ballani and I (and more recently another student Tuan Cao) have been working on a way to scale FIBs without requiring any changes to routers or routing protocols, and without requiring and coordination between ISPs. Rather, it can all be done through configuration. The basic idea is to split the IP address space into virtual prefixes, and then run each prefix as a kind of VPN. As far as we can tell, an ISP can realistically get 5x to 10x reduction in FIB size with very little (a few precentage) increase in load and latency. (Or, looked at another way, an ISP can extend the lifetime of its routers by many years without any real performance hit.)
We've written up a short informal description of the idea, posted at http://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/francis/va-wp.pdf. This work doesn't have all the capabilities that I know the RRG is going after (mobility, traffic engineering), but nevertheless I thought folks would be interested. Any comments appreciated. PF -- to unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word 'unsubscribe' in a single line as the message text body. archive: <http://psg.com/lists/rrg/> & ftp://psg.com/pub/lists/rrg
