* Iljitsch van Beijnum: > On 10-okt-04, at 19:23, Florian Weimer wrote: > >> 1. Some core protocols are heavily patent-encumbered, though, or have >> become encumbered as implementation strategies evolved. Efficient >> packet forwarding is certainly one of the Internet fundamentals, >> however it's far from obvious how to implement it without breaking a >> couple of patents > > Can you elaborate? A stateless longest-prefix matching algorithm which costs only a few dozen cycles (or very few cache misses) per lookup (even for random addresses), provides fast routing table inserts and reasonably efficient deletes is not exactly trivial to come up with. A few people have been looking for something that is reasonably fast and not covered by patents yet, but I'm not aware of any interesting discoveries. (I'm talking about software implementation here. Network search engines/TCAM might be too trivial to be patentable, and you probably can punt liability to the TCAM manufacturer anyway.) _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf