Towards a Gigabit IP Router

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Asthana, Abhaya | Delph, Catherine | Jagadish, H. V. | Krzyzanowski, Paul

Affiliations: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey 07974, USA

Abstract: In this paper we illustrate the application of SWIM's Active Storage Element (ASE) module in constructing high performance IP routers. The logic associated with each ASE is a wide-instruction-word micro-programmable engine, that has been specially designed to efficiently perform operations such as pointer dereferencing, memory indirection, bounds checking, and so forth. This makes it well suited to performing operations such as parsing of the IP header, routing table lookup, checksum computation and exception processing. Our results show that a single ASE running at 20 MHz can process 400,000 packets per second: well over that required to sustain a gigabit router. Multiple ASEs can be used in parallel to achieve even higher processing rates.

Keywords: Multiprocessor, Network Protocol, Internet Routing, Intelligent Memory, High Performance Communication

DOI: 10.3233/JHS-1992-1401

Journal: Journal of High Speed Networks, vol. 1, no. 4, pp. 281-288, 1992