Research Of IP Virtual Switches And Its Implementation Technologies

The enormous rise in usage and popularity of Internet as well as the introduction of new applications, such as voice and video applications, have motivated the Internet Community towards the research for improving the Quality of Service (QoS) of networks.Future integrated services packet networks are expected to support diverse applications with very different quality of service requirements and control mechanisms, ranging from the traditional best effort service of the current Internet, to complex value-added services and hard guarantees for rate and delay. Diverse application service requirements make current same-service-to-all model inadequate and limiting.The classical routers can only provide one single BE (Best Effort) service, and unable to meet the requirements of diverse applications. To address these problems, routers must be programmable and enhanced to effectively support the diverse traffic forwarding or switching service requirements of different network users and applications. It is a trend that dynamic adaptation to applications and network environment is realized through programmability of routers that support multiservice switching.How to manage resources is the key issue for implementation of multiservice switching or forwarding. To support dynamic multi-class virtual forwarding services, and effectively control resource allocation and its use across services, the problem of resource partition and control mechanisms must be studied.This dissertation presents a new programmable architecture of multiservice router based on virtual partition mechanism: IPVSW (IP Virtual Switches). Composing of three planes logically decoupled from each other and two programming interfaces, the IPVSW maps multiple Softswitch services over one IP router, and provides flexible packets manipulation and forwarding control suitable to multi-class application traffic.After deeply analyzing the composition and implementation functions of IPVSW, this dissertation also studies the key technology for realization of IPVSW: resource partition mechanism. The dynamic virtual multiservice forwarding of IPVSW is efficiently implemented due to the flexible and efficient resource virtual partition (VP) algorithm. Having formally studied and analyzed the virtual partition mechanism in details, this dissertation also design and describe its implementation algorithm, andapply it in the prototype of IPVSW.The achievements of this dissertation can be concluded as follows:1. A new hierarchical architecture of IP virtual switches, IPVSW, is proposed. Composed of three planes (IP switching, IP softswitching, and monitor planes) and two programmable interfaces (IP switching-softswitching and softswitching -management interfaces), the IPVSW can support dynamic multi-class traffic forwarding services adapting to network application environments.2. Under the IPVSW, this dissertation constructs virtual-resource-layer-based forwarding virtual resource envelopes (Vsw: Virtual switchlets), which are logical representations of partial resources of routers, and its forwarding control and extended processing softswitches (SSw: SoftSwitches). By control the Vsw, the SSw can finish application-specific forwarding services, and make forwarding resources to be utilized more efficiently.3. For the virtual multiservice structure of IPVSW, this dissertation brings forward a new virtual partition (VP) mechanism for service resources, and gives an implementation study and formal evaluation, and designs the service-curve-based algorithm implemented in the prototype of IPVSW. The VP mechanism allows inter-service controllable resource sharing, while provides resources isolation among services, which make network resources utilization flexible and efficiency.4. A prototype of IPVSW is designed and implemented, which is based on the basic principles and control schemes of IPVSW, to validate the basic idea and the related mechanisms of IPVSW, including VP.5. Elementary research of some other key technolo...