High speed IP switching over the EtherSwitch

As the randomness of the network traffic patterns increases, a big portion of user traffic traverses multiple network domains. At the same time, highspeed local area networks deliver more traffic than ever into the campus, corporate, and even the Internet backbones. Consequently, the router has become the bottleneck in the Internet infrastructure. IP switching, which uses a cut-through technique over ATM hardware to speed up the forwarding of IP traffic, is a technology breakthrough to enhance the performance of the router. Nevertheless, the high cost of ATM hardware impedes the wide acceptance of the architecture. We propose to implement the concept of fast IP switching over the lower-cost and readily available EtherSwitch technology. The resulting structure is called Fast IP switching over EtherSwitch, or IPS/ES. IPS/ES puts layer-3 routing into the layer-2 EtherSwitch and utilizes layer-3 cut-through by identifying IP flows. As a result, layer-3 traffic can be forwarded by layer-3 switching hardware with a high speed. We define a protocol for neighboring IPS/ES switches to identify flows and create cut-through paths for them. The problems of compatibility between IPS/ES switches and traditional routers/switches are discussed and addressed as well. Simulation studies are performed to show the effectiveness of the design and to provide guidelines for implementation.