Research On Special High-performance Packet Forwarding Engine And Its Key Technologies

The rapid development of Internet technology and application takes higher requirements for core routers or switches: First, they need sustain the link rate which grows faster and faser. Second, they have to support IPv4, IPv6 and MPLS protocols. Third, they need supply plentiful QoS Guarantees. Forwarding Engine is the key to realize all kinds of packets forwarding process, which serve as one of the key components to realize IP processing in routers or switches. According to the requirements on one of key projects for the National Eleventh Five-year Plan and aiming at the studies on forwarding engine and its key technologies of special high-performance switches or routers, this dissertation is devoted to the research of special high-performance forwarding engine supporting multi-protocols and their implementations.First in this dissertation, the detail analyse on high-performance forwarding engine is presented, and according to the requirements on the project, the way to implement the special high-performance forwarding engine is expounded. And then in this dissertation, the requirements of special application, design principles and packet process are described in detail. On this basis, a parallel pipeline forwarding engine prototype is designed and a special high-performance forwarding engine based on single channel process is implemented with FPGA. Then the performance design and analysis on forwarding engine are made from theoretical foundation. Besides, the multi-protocol forwarding lookup based on TCAM, as well as the multi-stage scheduling strategy of QoS based on classification and flow are implemented, which can meet the demands of the project.Last in this dissertation, a hardware implementation of the forwarding engine based on FPGA, the test method and the test environment of this system are introduced, as well as the test results are listed, which indicated that the forwarding engine with schemes proposed above can support 10G POS and 10G LAN interface forwarding at line-speed for IPv4, IPv6 and MPLS packet.