Design and evaluation of a pipelined forwarding engine

Recent advances in broadband technology have caused forwarding engines to handle packets with over 10 gigabit per second. In this paper, we present a high-speed forwarding pipeline which can finish all of the routing and forwarding tasks in the way of pipelining. We also establish the analysis model of the pipeline with which one can evaluate some key performance parameters of the forwarding engine such as forwarding rate and forwarding delay. We find that the pipeline is of good scalability and can forward unicast packets up to the speed of 40Gbit/s.

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