Contact: Jean-Yves Le Boudec
The explosive growth of the Internet has led to extensive research in the area of new IP router architectures. A trend has emerged towards less centralized, more distributed or parallelized devices, where packet processing is no longer carried out by a central processor (forwarding engine), but is distributed among multiple smaller network processors (forwarding engines). Recently, a framework has been proposed [1] to analyze two types of models: a distributed router architecture and a parallel router architecture. The proposed analyzing framework enables to determine optimal allocation of processing power to the processing nodes, while achieving a given level of packet processing performance and minimizing the overall cost of the device. However, the proposed framework remains limited by a number of restrictive assumptions.
- to perform a sanity check on the assumptions made for the proposed optimization framework
- to further extend the existing framework by:
- including the intra-router communication delay
- using a more realistic (non-linear) function for processor cost/performance relation
- extending the line card load distribution model to asymmetric models
- using a more complicated packet arrival process model, based on existing traffic traces
- to perform analysis and optimizations over the extended analyzing framework using basic simulation techniques
- to draw conclusions out of optimization results about future products architecture
Skills required:
TCP/IP knowledge, basic simulation tools
Benefits:
getting acquainted with up-to-date research in the IP router architecture and gaining experience in problem optimization
Industry:
IBM Zurich Research Lab
Advisor:
Lukas Kencl, IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, Tel: +41-1-724 84 26, Fax: +41-1-724 89 55, E-mail: [email protected], (EPFL contact: Prof. JY Le Boudec)
References:
[1] A Framework for Optimizing the Cost and Performance of Next-Generation IP Routers, H. C. B. Chan, H. M. Alnuweiri, V. C. M. Leung, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, Vol. 17, pp. 1013-1029, June 1999.
[2] A Fifty Gigabit Per Second IP Router, C. Partridge et al, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Vol. 6, pp. 237-248, June 1998.
[3] National Laboratory for Applied Network Research (NLANR), traffic analysis support http://www.nlanr.net/