This would be easily solved if routers worked on Content Adressable Memory, not Random Access Memory. Meaning the router would not look at a specific address in its table and ask if it contained the required data for all 2000000000 of its adresses, it would look for the specific data and then grab that associated address, instead of using a search algorithm. The difference being that searching for specific data is combinational logic and not sequential, and can be done in O(1) time instead of >= O(n) I know most air trafic control systems work using CAM (i need to find whether ANY plane is in this grid, i don't need to check every plane and ask if it is in this grid)
So in that example, to find mr. smith, the router would just have to do ask the memory for mr. smith and the memory would say, i have a mr. smith in block "n", in ~one clock cycle
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This would be easily solved if routers worked on Content Adressable Memory, not Random Access Memory. Meaning the router would not look at a specific address in its table and ask if it contained the required data for all 2000000000 of its adresses, it would look for the specific data and then grab that associated address, instead of using a search algorithm. The difference being that searching for specific data is combinational logic and not sequential, and can be done in O(1) time instead of >= O(n) I know most air trafic control systems work using CAM (i need to find whether ANY plane is in this grid, i don't need to check every plane and ask if it is in this grid) So in that example, to find mr. smith, the router would just have to do ask the memory for mr. smith and the memory would say, i have a mr. smith in block "n", in ~one clock cycle