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

[Scott Leibrand]

On 12/18/2009 9:19 PM, Michel Py wrote:
>
> I don't think we have much maneuvering room though; the benefits of
> Moore's law helping building faster routers are more or less offset by
> the same Moore's law helping building more bandwidth-hungry consumer
> devices.

Except that the bandwidth of consumer devices is completely independent 
of the number of routes we have to stuff into our FIB.  That is 
dependent on the number of independently multihomed networks, which is 
determined by economic and business forces.

>   In other words, growth of the DFZ table has to rely on router
> enhancements, not on riding Moore's law.
>    

I believe that enhancements in router FIB capacity are to some degree 
dependent on the same forces driving Moore's law.  Obviously keeping 
Moore's law going (whether in CPUs or in TCAMs) requires hard 
engineering work, but that's not the point.  The point of Moore's law is 
that all that hard work results in a periodic doubling of capacity (in 
this case, FIB routes) for the same price.  For now, that improvement is 
keeping ahead of the growth rate of networks seeking to multihome.

> There is no such thing as "PI for everyone" in the foreseeable future.
>    

If by "everyone" you mean "every organization with a single-homed 
network", then I agree, that will be infeasible at least as long as 
we're running BGP4.  But as long as we move the bar gradually, I think 
we can safely move toward a situation where PI addresses are generally 
available for multihomed organizations who are willing to pay their 
providers enough to run BGP.

-Scott

-Scott