This might be obvious to the routing bods out there but as that definitely doesn't include me I thought it was cool.
Routing is solution to a bandwidth and processing constraint - if we didn't have these constraints one wouldn't need routing. Imagine a system where each node, in order to geta packet to its partner, encodes that packet with the partners public key (leave key exchange out of this for the moment). The encrypted packet is then flooded into the network reaching all nodes. Each node then tries to decrypt the packet - only the one that the packet is destined for is able to decrypt the packet and thus it arrives safely at its destination.
Obviously, at the limit this has every node simultaneously decrypting every packet in the network - so clearly this is constrained by processing and bandwidth.
Interesting thought though as we move towards a pretty hefty re-design of routing to cope with more mobile devices on the network...
Posted by james at May 31, 2003 05:22 AM