COMP 680E: High-Speed Internet Switches and Routers

Spring Semester 2007

• Introduction (2 weeks)
  • General introduction about high-speed networking
  • Evolution of packet switches and routers, basic architectural components, some example architectures.
  • Architecture and operation of “optical” circuit-switched switches/routers
  • Architecture and operation of “optical” burst-switches switches/routers
• Network Processors: Table Lookup and Packet Classification (1 week)
  • Table Lookup: Exact matches, longest prefix matches, performance metrics, hardware and software solutions.
  • Packet classifiers: For firewalls, QoS, and policy-based routing; graphical description and examples of 2-D classification, examples of classifiers, theoretical and practical considerations.

• High-Performance Packet Switches/Routers: VOQ (2 weeks)
  • Architectural alternatives
  • Virtual output queued (VOQ) switches
  • Design and analysis of unicast arbitration algorithms
  • Design and analysis of multicast scheduling algorithms
  • Providing quality-of-service guarantees on VOQ switches
• Output-queued and Shared Memory Switches (2 weeks)
  • Architectures, performance, and problems
  • Output scheduling: Motivation - providing bandwidth and delay guarantees, fairness - definitions and algorithms, practical considerations and practical algorithms, end-to-end delay guarantees
  • Differentiated Services
• Congestion Control and Active Queue Management (1 week)
  • Active queue management: Introduction and motivation, dropping packets to reduce congestion, dropping packets for QoS, packet dropping vs. packet scheduling, theory, practical algorithms.
• Optical “Circuit-Switched” Switches and Routers (1 week)
  • Introduction and motivation
  • Optical Technology
  • Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM)
  • Architectural alternatives
  • Switch configuration and scheduling algorithms
• Optical “Burst-Switched” Switches and Routers (1 week)
  • Introduction and motivation
  • Burst switching protocols
  • Burst switch architectures
  • Scheduling Burst switches

• Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) for the Optical Internet (1 week)
  • Introduction and motivation
  • Traffic Engineering using MPLS
  • Implementation of MPLS on Switches/routers

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