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 routers 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 the 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. In this paper, 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.