Research And Implementation Of Cooperation Protocol Of Forwarding Elements In OpenRouter Architecture

The Internet is evolving from an infrastructure that provides basic communication service into a more sophisticated system that supports a wide range o f new services, which brings much more challenges to traditional router architecture, especially in the aspects of performance, scalability, easiness of new service deployment and system availability etc. Therefore, through analyzing active network, programmable network and open controlling network, we present a model, called OpenRouter, which is an open, flexible and extensible generic router architecture.This thesis puts emphasis on dealing with the problem of cooperating forwarding elements in our OpenRouter architecture. After discussing a central cooperation policy, we put forward a protocol, called DCP (Distributed Cooperation Protocol). In this protocol, a neighbour detection and maintenance mechanism is presented to tackle the problem of topology discovery for forwarding plane, an improved path-vector algorithm is used to dynamically set up inner forwarding paths, and several essential methods are provided to share and feedback information and schedule packets between forwarding elements.In order to evaluate the availability and feasibility, the DCP is implemented in an OpenRouter based software cluster router. Furthermore, we design the IFE (Inner Forwarding Engine) by expanding the traditional TCP/IP network stack. Configured and managed by the DCP, the IFE can efficiently fulfill the tasks of packets delivery, load balancing and scheduling, and packets redirection.Finally, according to the requirements of the cooperation problem and the benchmark for network interconnect devices, we design a set of test cases to evaluate the software cluster router and the OpenRouter model. The test results verify that the DCP and the IFE can construct a virtual forwarding cluster, cooperate multiple forwarding elements and forward packets effectively.