Gb Switched Router

This paper presents an alternative architecture for high speed router design. Instead of using a traditional shared bus, it opts to use a crossplane that can enable multiple flows being routed from input port to output port simultaneously. In addition, it proposes destination based multiple queues and use of priority class to improve the delay vs. throughput curve. Moreover, it uses a combined unicast and multicast scheduler to maintain priority and avoid starvation.

As a white paper, it gives a lot of background in router design and archtecture, which is why I chose to read it first. I would suggest putting this paper before the other one to give students a good background in how commodity routers are designed.

This design is clearly geared towards building top end high speed router that have many input and output ports. As we know today, power is becoming an important constraint on routers. The paper did not analyze how this architectural change affects power usage. Some recent proposals indicates that many smaller commodity routers can potentially be used to build larger and faster routers.