Research And Implementation On A New Router Architecture

The router is the key component of Internet. Nowadays, with the development of router's performance and function, how router meets the needs of future evolvement in network technology and application is becoming the hot research topic. Many novel network router architectures have been proposed during past years, including active network, programmable network, open controlling model, software extensible model and user controlling model to enhance the router's applicability, but there are many challenges such as openness, extensibility, scalability, application awareness and availability etc.This thesis focuses on the problem that current router architecture can not meet the requirements of next generation Internet, especially for router control architecture, and proposes an OpenRouter model, which is a highly open, flexible and extensible generic router architecture. OpenRouter divides traditional router into forwarding entity(FE) and control entity(CE), and control entity can future be divided into control service layer and operation service layer. The openness of OpenRouter model is achieved by defining three open application programming interfaces(API) between FE and CE, control service layer and operation service layer, control service layer and user applications. These open APIs include control API(C-API), programming API(P-API) and user API (U-API). C-API is a control separation protocol, which separates control plane from router forwarding plane and enhances the scalability and flexibility of router control plane greatly. P-API provides extremely flexible and inter-operational API for the developments of network control protocols. U-API supports information access interface of control service layer, through which user applications could access control information about network and achieves awareness to network. The multi-dimension scalability of OpenRouter model comes from three cooperation mechanisms among control entities and forwarding entities. These cooperation mechanisms include Control Service Cooperation Protocol (CSCP), Control Entitiy Cooperation Protocol (CECP) and Forward Entitiy Cooperation Protocol (FECP). OpenRouter model could support the distributed parallel processing of control protocol among CEs, the cooperation and redundant backup of multi-CEs and forwarding cluster of multi-FEs with these cooperation protocols.The cooperation mechanisms are the key issues of OpenRouter scalability. This thesis focuses on CECP protocol and FECP protocol, discusses important algorithms and cooperation policies of them. The most important problem of FECP protocol is the dynamic creation of forwarding paths in forwarding entities cluster. Based on two typical application environment of small scale forwarding cluster and massive forwarding cluster, a Central Path Construction...