* 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.)
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