Design of a Scalable IP Router
Vibhavasu Vuppala, Lionel Ming-shuan Ni · 1997
: Conventional routers are unable to scale to accommodate the explosive growth of the Internet traffic due to their architectural constraints. Their architecture does not allow for scalability by the addition of more processing nodes or faster bus technology. There has been an emergence of very high speed, economical and scalable SAN/LAN interconnects providing bandwidths of gigabits per second. Design of an IP router composed of off-the-shelf processors interconnected by such SAN/LAN switches is proposed. Implementation of a prototype and its performance are described. 1. Introduction The exponential growth of the Internet traffic has long become a clich. This is not only due to the rapidly growing size of the Internet but also due to the new multimedia rich applications, whose demand for higher bandwidths is never satisfied. This demand for higher bandwidth has been met by the communications industry; technologies like ATM are making gigabit networks feasible. But all these f...