What problem should we be working on?

[abha ahuja]

Hi Sean...

[...]

> We can make similar measurements of the rate of growth in CPU load on core
> routers to see if the growth rate is also slower than Moore's Law.  Does
> anyone have data that might allow us to determine this growth rate?

I think Vijay's slides from NANOG might include this?

> As Geoff pointed out, there are strong economic forces that are pushing us
> towards finer grained policy in the core routing table.  No matter what we
> do, we will have to cope with very large core routing tables until a
> replacement for BGP4 can be deployed.  If the amount of resources consumed in
> the core routers is not a problem, then we should be spending more time
> identifying the factors that will really cause us problems in the future, and
> designing schemes to deal with them.  Since we know from Craig and Abha's
> work that convergence times grow with denser interconnectivity, it is likely
> that the biggest problem we will face in the near future is increasing
> convergence times.

Right.  Most definitely.  Keep in mind that there are multiple efforts
occurring in parallel here.  There is the short term fixes to the BGP
protocol itself in IDR, the middle frameworking and possible new protocol
things and the longer range stuff for a new routing architecture that goes
on in the IRTF.

The ptomaine stuff is definitely aimed at the immediate need (or maybe in
a few months out) to help us deal with the operational issues.  

But, I agree, we all need to understand exactly what the factors are with
regard to growth and scaling.

> Do we know how proxy aggregation will affect convergence times?  
> Naively it seems that proxy aggregation has a chance of helping, since
> it might hide some of the finer-grained routing changes from ASes
> downstream of the aggregator.  On the other hand, it might also
> increase route volatility by coupling transitions in separate routes
> together.  For example, if the aggregate must be withdrawn whenever
> one of the aggregated routes is withdrawn, then this seems to be the
> most likely outcome.  We need to try and determine which of these
> outcomes is more likely to occur. 

Most definitely.

-abha ;)