Parallel IP packet forwarding for tomorrow's IP routers

The invention and evolution of the dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) technology has brought a breakthrough to high-speed networks, and it has put a lot of pressure on research in the area of IP router to catch up. Besides, with up-coming quality of service (QoS) requirements raised by a wide range of communication-intensive, real-time multimedia applications, the next-generation IP routers should be QoS-capable. Limited by Moore's law, one possible solution is to introduce parallelism as well as the differentiated service (DiffServ) scheme [5, 11] into the router architecture to provide QoS provision at a high speed and a low cost. We propose a novel architecture called the high-performance QoS-capable IP router (HPQR). We address one key design issue in our architecture-the distribution of IP packets to multiple independent routing agents so that the workload at routing agents is balanced and the packet ordering is preserved. We introduce the enhanced hash-based distributing scheme (EHDS) as the solution. Simulations are carried out to study the effectiveness of EHDS. The results show that EHDS does meet our design goals very well.