  While there exist compact routing schemes designed for grids, trees, and
Internet-like topologies that offer routing tables of sizes that scale
logarithmically with the network size, we demonstrate in this paper that in
view of recent results in compact routing research, such logarithmic scaling on
Internet-like topologies is fundamentally impossible in the presence of
topology dynamics or topology-independent (flat) addressing. We use analytic
arguments to show that the number of routing control messages per topology
change cannot scale better than linearly on Internet-like topologies. We also
employ simulations to confirm that logarithmic routing table size scaling gets
broken by topology-independent addressing, a cornerstone of popular
locator-identifier split proposals aiming at improving routing scaling in the
presence of network topology dynamics or host mobility. These pessimistic
findings lead us to the conclusion that a fundamental re-examination of
assumptions behind routing models and abstractions is needed in order to find a
routing architecture that would be able to scale ``indefinitely.''
