Thanks, yes those seem like possible algorithms that would work great with today's technology.
And yes, every time new traffic appears at a 'core' router, entering it into a cache would be another great algorithm. But they do that now, so no patents for us.
I love it when somebody 'objects' to a plan, then proceeds to describe the solution succinctly.
> every time new traffic appears at a 'core' router, entering it into a cache
How does that new traffic appear in the core router? I has to appear in every core router, otherwise hosts connected to a a core router which didn't receive that traffic recently wouldn't know how to route to your host. So the answer would be flooding, which is extremely wasteful of bandwidth and processing power. Also, it's a cache, which means it expires, so you have to flood the host announcements constantly (and even if it doesn't expire, you have core routers going down and being replaced). Once you think over all the details on how to fix these issues, what you end up with is basically a routing algorithm, like BGP or others, only replacing the "network" by a single host.
And once you arrive at a routing algorithm, consider that routing algorithms have a long history, and have already received a lot of research. That naive "flooding" algorithm is basically RIP, one of the oldest routing algorithms; there are good reasons why most people don't use RIP anymore.
Sure, lots of history. Which is why new solutions are such a hard sell - everybody quote an authority and concludes 'it has to be this way'.
Traffic appears at core routers because it already gets send there by peripheral routers as a gateway. Sharing routing information between peer routers is not unsolvable nor likely onerous.
Strawman solutions (flood constantly) are being deliberately dense. I suspect because, folks are so very comfortable with what they know, and so very unwilling to extend themselves. How we got IPV6 in the first place. Which isn't working either.
> Traffic appears at core routers because it already gets send there by peripheral routers as a gateway. Sharing routing information between peer routers is not unsolvable nor likely onerous. Strawman solutions (flood constantly) are being deliberately dense.
If by "sharing routing information between peer routers" you mean that, when a router learn of a new host, it shares that information with its peer routers, which then share that information with their peer routers, that is flooding. Without flooding, the traffic would not appear at every core router, which means most routers would not know of your host.
> I suspect because, folks are so very comfortable with what they know, and so very unwilling to extend themselves.
I once seriously considered how to make an Internet-scale non-hierarchical routing protocol, where the host identifier was a cryptographic hash of its cryptographic public key. The reverse path is easy; once A has successfully sent a packet to B, all routers in the middle know how to get from B to A. The forward path (from A to B) is the hard one. Every router knowing every host is non-viable; consider, for instance, what happens when my phone roams from the WiFi to the LTE and back (which happens many times per day) - if every router had to know of that change, for every roaming phone in the world, it would be enough to overwhelm all the links between them, not to mention their CPUs. I came to the conclusion that the amount of propagation of the route updates must be limited for it to be viable, so having every router know of every host is not possible. Either the routing information must be summarized somehow (which is what the hierarchical routing used with IPv4 and IPv6 does), or some other way which does not involve the routers (for instance, path routing, like MPLS) must be used.
That is, I'm not rejecting your idea because I "feel comfortable" with hierarchical routing, I'm rejecting your idea because I've already given it (or something like it) serious consideration, and found it harder than what I had initially thought.
No I don't mean the worst interpretation thinkable, when I say 'share that information'.
Glad to see you've thought of the issues. Now lets brainstorm solutions.
A DNS-style authority with the answer to the routers' questions perhaps. Updated by the leaf router with some route coloring info for a new leaf node perhaps. Inquired upon cache miss by core routers? Aged out for frequent updating (roaming, unique ID per connect, and other short-lived routes).
And yes, every time new traffic appears at a 'core' router, entering it into a cache would be another great algorithm. But they do that now, so no patents for us.
I love it when somebody 'objects' to a plan, then proceeds to describe the solution succinctly.