An Assessment of State and Lookup Overhead in Routers

The current Internet is based on a stateless (datagram) architecture. However, many recent proposals rely on the maintenance of state information within network routers, leading to our interest in the implications of a slateful network layer. We collected internetwork traffic traces at the border routers of stub and transit networks, and use this data to evaluate, or predict, the effects of design alternatives for stateful architectures. We present an estimate of the number of active conversations at a router, from this we derive the storage requirements for the associated conversation state table. Our analysis shows that at the network periphery fine grain control over the traffic may be possible. However, deeper within the network, it may be more efficient to manage the conversations at a coarser level. We use our network traffic traces to perform trace driven simulations of an LRU cache, for different conversation granularities. Our results show that locality exists for each of the...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1992
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Deborah Estrin, Danny J. Mitzel
• Keywords: Associated Conversation State, Communications, INFOCOM 1992, Network Routers, Slateful Network Layer