One thing that I thought was interesting when Dave mention indefinite scalability had something to do with IP address space. This got me to thinking about what kinds of issue might be encounter when attempting to scale IP beyond even the 128 bits used for IPv6 addresses. One of the problems that I came to realize in thinking about this was the fact that you can't simply tack on some extra bits in the most significant bits of the address or something like that. The problem is that the NIC has finite space to buffer data onto it. Just imagine growing IP addresses to the point where the number of bits required to represent an address exceeded the number of bits in the NIC's ingress buffer. How would this problem be fixed?
To be completely honest, this may be a completely crazy question considering the fact that you could assign every particle on planet Earth an address in IPv6 address space. It's definitely a fun idea to think about none the less.
No comments:
Post a Comment