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tony1athomeon A brief history of router architecture

Stuck at Clos networks. Not expected to make significant further progress.

tony1athomeon A brief history of router architecture

Everything that I talk about is internal to the router.

Some of us think that the architecture of big routers is plenty important. It's those routers that hold up the backbone of the Internet and a whole lot of other places.

Yes, you can build distributed routers. The supernode that I discuss is one such example. But that doesn't mean that you want to build it with a bunch of tiny home routers that you bought off the shelf at Fry's. You still want to start with fairly chunky building blocks, otherwise you end up suffering from a lot of inefficiencies just interconnecting things. Jonathan Turner calls this the 'small switch penalty'.

tony1athomeon A brief history of router architecture

Thank you for the kind comments. If you have questions, I'm happy to answer them. -- Tony Li