A Scalable and Programmable Modular Traffic Manager Architecture
Shane O’Neill, Roger Woods, Alan Marshall, Qi Zhang · ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems · 2011
A key issue in the design of next-generation Internet routers and switches will be provision of Traffic Manager (TM) functionality in the datapaths of their high-speed switching fabrics. A new architecture that allows dynamic deployment of different TM functions is presented. By considering the processing requirements of operations such as policing and congestion, queuing, shaping, and scheduling, a solution has been derived that is scalable with a consistent programmable interface. Programmability is achieved using a function computation unit which determines the action (e.g., drop, queue, remark, forward) based on the packet attribute information and a memory storage part. Results of a Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA reference design are presented.