Building Scalable Next Generation Internet Routers

PhD Thesis Proposal Defence


Title: "Building Scalable Next Generation Internet Routers"

by

Mr. Feng WANG


Abstract:

With the constantly growing Internet traffic and development of
broadband access technologies such as DSL, cable modem and gigabit
Ethernet, future broadband packet switches/routers should be able
to support a large number of connection ports for at least the
following two reasons: a) the number of Internet access points is
still rapidly increasing; and b) the development of optical
transmission technologies makes huge number of communication
channels available. Both facts impose a challenge on the router's
scalability with regard to this increasing number of network flows
and switching ports. In addition, routers are also required to be
able to provide Quality-of-Service (QoS) at the surge of
triple-play services (data, voice and video) in
Next-Generation-Networks (NGN) . In this proposal, we try to
address the connection ports scalability issue and design the
routers with QoS support as well.

The two main router components we are investigating are: the
switch fabric and the memory subsystem. We start from the
Space-Memory-Space switch design paradigm that is proven to
provide QoS relatively easily, and use the Clos-interconnection to
scale its space parts. By making all buffers fully shared (in a
distributed way), we show that the Central-stage Buffered
Clos-network (CBC we propose) are scalable in terms of not only
the hardware cost, but the efficient scheduling algorithms as
well. To scale the router's memory subsystem, we employ
parallelism into current SRAM/DRAM combination solutions and
design a Parallel Hybrid SRAM/DRAM (PHSD) memory system. By a very
simple yet efficient memory management algorithm, we show that the
PHSD can significantly outperform previous solutions by
reducing both the packet delay and the costly SRAM requirements.


Date:     		Monday, 5 May 2008

Time:                   10:30a.m.-12:30p.m.

Venue:                  Room 3301
			lifts 17-18

Committee Members:      Prof. Mounir Hamdi (Supervisor)
			Dr. Qian Zhang (Chairperson)
                        Dr. Yunhao Liu
			Dr. Jogesh Muppala


**** ALL are Welcome ****