Fast Incremental Updates for Pipelined Forwarding Engines

— Pipelined ASIC architectures are increasingly being used in forwarding engines for high speed IP routers. We explore optimization issues in the design of memory-efficient data structures that support fast incremental updates in such forwarding engines. Our solution aims to balance the memory utilization across the multiple pipeline stages. We also propose a series of optimizations that minimize the disruption to the forwarding process caused by route updates. These optimizations reduce the update overheads by a factor of 2-5 for a variety of different core routing tables and update traces.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Anindya Basu, Girija J. Narlikar
• Keywords: Communications, Fast Incremental Updates, Forwarding Engines, INFOCOM 2003, Speed Ip Routers