IP traffic on the Internet and enterprise networks has been growing exponentially in the last several years, and much attention is being focused on the use of IP multicast for real-time multimedia applications. The current soft and general-purpose CPU-based routers face great stress since they have great latency and low forwarding speeds. Based on the ASICs, layer 2 switching provides high-speed packet forwarding. Integrating high-speed of Layer 2 switching with the flexibility of Layer 3 routing, Layer 3 switching (IP switching) has been put forward in order to avoid the performance bottleneck associated with Layer 3 forwarding. In this paper, we present a prototype system of a scalable IP switching based on scalable ATM switching fabric and optical interconnect. The IP switching system mainly consists of the input/output interface unit, scalable ATM switching fabric and IP control component. Optical interconnects between the input fan-out stage and the interconnect stage, also the interconnect stage and the output concentration stage provide high-speed data paths. And the interconnect stage is composed of 16 X 16 CMOS-SEED ATM switching modules. With 64 ports of OC-12 interface, the maximum throughput of the prototype system is about 20 million packets per second (MPPS) for 256 bytes average packet length, and the packet loss ratio is less than 10e-9. Benefiting from the scalable architecture and the optical interconnect, this IP switching system can easily scale to very large network size.

Date Published: 9 October 2000
PDF: 5 pages
Proc. SPIE 4225, Optical Interconnects for Telecommunication and Data Communications, (9 October 2000); doi: 10.1117/12.402729

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 4225:
Optical Interconnects for Telecommunication and Data Communications
Xiaomin Ren; Suning Tang, Editor(s)