[arin-ppml] Does Moore's law help with routing table growth?

[Scott Leibrand]

On 12/17/2009 7:45 PM, Michel Py wrote:

>  That is a very valid point, and although I would have a few arguments
>  about the demand side driving the supply side, I will not start a
>  discussion about this because it would be as productive as the chicken
>  and egg problem. The relation between supply and demand is complex.
>
>
>>  The cost of transporting a bit is a function of the cost to route
>>  it (electronics), and the cost to transport it (optics). Routing
>>  costs seem to be tied to some version of Moore's law. Although
>>  there are specialized components like TCAM that don't observe the
>>  exact same factors as general purpose CPUs, they seem to be on a
>>  similar exponential curve.
>>
>  Agree. Back to the original topic, can we agree that Moore's law does
>  not help building faster routers and might even have a negative side,
>  because the general purpose CPU may be on a faster version of Moore's
>  law than TCAM?
>

Well, back to the original topic, what we need to be concerned with for
policy is not the relationship between bandwidth supply and demand, but
the relationship between the growth of the BGP routing table and the
growth of FIBs to accommodate it.  It appears to me that we're doing OK
there: router growth seems to be mostly keeping ahead of table growth.
As long as we don't dramatically increase the rate of growth of the
routing table, I think we're ok.  And AFAICT none of the policy
proposals currently on the table would change that growth rate enough to
alarm me.

-Scott