Talk:Potato routing

Some of my published observations -- conflict of interest?

In Building Service Provider Networks (Wiley, 2002), I wrote (pp. 355-358 deals generally with potatoes and routing):

"Routing protocol design follows Darwinian principles. The first priority is survival — of the local router and of the routing system as a whole. Just as the first priority of hippopotamus reproduction is for the hippos to look good to other hippos, the first priority of routers is they work well with other routers.

Optimal routing is not the first priority in making a robust riytubg system. Indeed route optimality may mean different things at different time. For a given application, mimimizing latecy is optimal. For a different application, maximizing throughput is optimal. Survival often means maximizing closest-exit routing and minimizing routing table churn. The latter depends significantly on maximizing route aggregation, which causes a loss of detail.

In any hierarchical routing system, there is a very basic issue of routing policy, variously called closest exit versus optimal exit or hot potato versus cold potato..."

and a lot more detail. On page 484, in the specific context of BGP routing where service level agreements are in place, I say:

"The Second Prime Directive Cold potato is the most rational strategy for premium services where quality of service is more important than minimizing cost.

Anyone got someone else to cite? I certainly didn't invent the term, but I haven't seen many tutorials about it. Howard C. Berkowitz 23:23, 15 July 2008 (CDT)