Workload Characterization and Performance for a Network

The explosive growth of the Internet and e-business requires faster deployment of high-bandwidth equipment, greater flexibility to support emerging Internet technologies, and new services within the network. The design of routers is being changed significantly by the emergence of Network Processors (NPs). With programmable NPs, exceptionally fast packet processing at high-bandwidth is achieved through the optimization of both the instruction set and data path. Routers have to perform complicated protocol stack processing with demands for various services. However, the fast packet switching path, namely the packet forwarding path with table look-up, filtering, queuing assignment and input/output scheduling, influences network performance more than the slow packet switching path. This paper characterizes router processing with pseudo code based on the fast path for an emerging network processor, the Intel IXP1200. It also addresses the workload characterization of the fast path in routers. I expect that those characterizations should be very useful to guide the architectural design of futur