Re: OT: prefix length used by backbone routers

[Greg Maxwell <gmaxwell@martin.fl.us>]

On Fri, 10 Aug 2001, J. Noel Chiappa wrote:

>     > From: Greg Maxwell <gmaxwell@martin.fl.us>
>
>     > Back on topic: The way multihoming is done will have a much more
>     > profound impact on how much work routers have to do.
>
> Please distinguish between "work in forwarding" and "work in the control
> plane, e.g. route selection computations" when you speak of work for routers -
> different schemes have important differences there.

The difference in control plain is a function of how many routes you place
in the table, not the depth of your lookup.

The type of transport level multihoming I've been calling for here would
make the size of your route table grow linearly (or better) with the
number of customers and peers you have, so your load is purely a local
issue. From a global perspective, there is no reason to believe that the
routing table size would be related to the depth of the lookups.

Why? Because there are already more possible /64 networks then we could
tolerate in any control plane, so going deeper doesn't make a difference.