Cluster-based IP Router: Implementation and Evaluation

IP routers are now increasingly expected to do more than just traditional packet forwarding – they must be extensible as well as scalable. It is a challenge to design a router architecture to support both high (and increasing) packet forwarding rates as well as a wide array of packet processing services. The most easily extensible design would be entirely softwarebased, but this is in tension with the requirement for high performance. One possible answer is to couple a software-based router with a high performance platform. Cluster-based supercomputers are very successful due to their scalability and high availability, and they also exhibit outstanding performance/cost ratio. In this paper, we describe the implementation and evaluation of an extensible and scalable softwarebased IP router, which is built using a cluster of processors connected by a high-speed / low latency InfiniBand interconnection network. Our measurements show that the performance of this router can be scaled nea...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: CLUSTER
• Authors: Qinghua Ye, Mike H. MacGregor
• Keywords: CLUSTER 2006, Cluster Computing, Ip Router, Packet Forwarding, Router