Because of the anarchic nature of TCP/IP, there has been a fear that the major backbone routers would collapse under the weight of having to manage the ever-increasing number of routing maps. However, two critical factors have since come into play that alleviate this concern, at least somewhat.
First of all, router performance has benefited from tremendous improvements in hardware and software. The demand for systems capable of handling thousands of routing entries has led to the development of such.
Second, new network assignment schemes are also being deployed that allow routes to be aggregated together. When you request a block of Internet addresses from your Internet Service Provider, they must assign one from a pool of blocks that have been previously assigned to them. When they need more addresses and blocks for their customers, they will be assigned another pool of sequentially-numbered blocks.
Because the address blocks are sequentially numbered, they can be routed as a single entity by the service providers above them. This alleviates much of the burden placed on the backbone routers.
Additionally, geography-based aggregation schemes are also being deployed. For example, any Class C network that begins with 194 is now associated with Europe. This allows the backbone routers to simply forward any packets for any network that begins with 194 to the main routers in Europe. Those routers will then forward the packets on to the service provider who is responsible for the destination network.
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