Abstract

M. Baldi, Y. Ofek, "Multi-Terabit/s IP Switching with Guaranteed Service for Streaming Traffic," IEEE INFOCOM 2006 High-Speed Networking Workshop, Barcelona (Spain), Apr. 2006.

Abstract
The steady Internet growth over the past few years is impressive, but services so far deployed over the Internet are nothing compared to the ones that can still be deployed. One likely scenario is that the future Internet will be dominated by applications such as (3D) video on demand, high quality videoconferencing, distributed gaming, (3D) virtual reality, remote surveillance, and many more. These applications generate traffic that is either by nature streaming or can be effectively handled as such (e.g., large file transfers). Moreover, most of these applications need a minimum guaranteed quality in order to be usable. Consequently, there is a real need to solve scalability and traffic engineering simultaneously — specifically, without using overprovisioning in order to provide predictable service.
Concerning scalability, it is interesting noting that Cisco’s top-of-the-line router, CRS-1, has a per chassis switching capacity of 640 Gb/s (the announcement of 92 Tb/s is to be divided by 2, to avoid twice packets first entering and exiting the switch, and then by 72 chassis’s), which represents an improvement over the Cisco 12000 by a factor of only 2 after 5 years of development — not the 18 months during which the Internet traffic doubles.
This paper shows how the Internet can benefit from UTCbased pipeline forwarding of IP packets that enables (i) ultrascalable IP switches – 10-50 Tb/s in a single chassis, (ii) quality of service (QoS) for UDP-based streaming applications (as a bonus since a deterministic service is inherent to the switching solution itself), while (iii) preserving elastic TCP-based best-effort traffic as is. Notice that no change can be seen when observing a link: standard (whole) IP packets encapsulated into Ethernet or PPP frames transit.