[rr-fs] current router scalability limits

[Dima Krioukov]

i'm experiencing some difficulties trying to find
a good set of references (preferably in conference
proceedings/journals) for relatively accurate
measurements of modern router scalability limits
(the focus is on bgp).

what's known to me so far is that:

1) routers can hold for up to a million of fibs
entries and do wire-speed lookups on them -- no problem.

2) routers can hold for up to several millions
of rib entries since they have a lot of memory --
no problem.

what's not known is even an estimate of how many rib
entries they can hold under realistic load on both
the control (bgp update traffic) and data (traffic
to forward) planes.

the latest results i could find so far are all not
later than ~2001, all saying that the answer is not
more than several hundred thousands before significant
performance degradation.

the central question seems to be how to introduce realistic
load on the control plane of a dut, ie synthetic bgp traffic,
but this all is work-in-progress (being done by olaf and anja,
and few folks from bell-labs).

is there anything i'm missing?

thanks,
--
dima.
http://www.caida.org/~dima/