TERABIT SWITCHES AND ROUTERS

Amit Singhal, amit@cse.wustl.edu

ABSTRACT

Just a few years back, no one would have thought that internet traffic will increase at such a rapid rate that even gigabit capacity routers in the backbone will be insufficient to handle it. Today, routers with terabit switching capacities have become an essential requirement of the core backbone networks and gigabit routers find their place at the mid-core or even the edge. This survey paper explains the issues in designing terabit routers and the solutions for them. It also discusses about some of the key products in this area.

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Table of Contents:

• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Architecture of Internet Routers
• 2.1 Router Functions
• 2.2 Evolution of Present Day Routers
• 2.3 Assessing Router Performance
• 3. Switching Vs Routing
• 3.1 Switching Hubs
• 3.2 Layer 2 Switching
• 3.3 Layer 3 Switching
• 3.4 Switching Above Layer 3
• 4. Efficient Routing Table Search
• 4.1 Tree based Algorithms
• 4.2 Techniques to Improve Route Lookup
• 4.3 Route Search at Gigabit Speeds
• 5. Router Architecture for the Differentiated Services
• 5.1 Components of Differentiated Services
• 5.2 No Queuing Before Header Processing
• 5.3 Queuing
• 5.4 Optimized Packet Processing
• 6. Survey of Products
• 6.1 Competitive Study of Leading Market Products
• 6.2 Individual Case Studies of Some Leading Products
• Summary
• References
• List of Acronyms

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