Analysis of an Evolvable Architecture of Internet Routers

Our work is motivated by the desire to build an evolvable architecture of Internet routers in which extremely high line-rates and IP-lookup rates are supported simply. In this paper, we consider building a packet-switch net from multi-stage, lower speed components called forwarding and switching node (FSN) performing IP-lookups and switching independently. In particular, we propose a pipelined and scalable packet switch (PSPS) architecture in which the IP lookups and packet switching for multiple packets are overlapped by accessing different FSN (in different stages) for different packets at the same time. Since this is a position paper, we do not present results but rather present the concrete approaches adopted in a PSPS and suggest interesting directions for PSPS research.