2. Scalability

2.1 Introduction

Since the specification of the BGP IV routing protocol in 1995 [RFC 1771], the Internet network has grown considerably, both in terms of the number of users and public IP networks interconnected via BGP, and in terms of the number of full routes on the Internet (Internet full routing):

• figure 15 shows the evolution of the number of IPv4 addresses on the Internet. The unit is the number of "/8" prefixes, which contain 2^24 (16.7 million) individual addresses. As a first approximation, this can be taken to represent the evolution of the number of machines connected to the Internet;