Performance Evaluation Of The Flow-Based Router Using Intel Ixp2800 Network Processors

Exponential increment of users and emergence of realtime services with QoS requirements cause a great change of Internet traffic characteristics from early best-effort characteristics. The currently developed packet-based router with MPLS and DiffServ technologies has still limitations on providing services with QoS guarantee. Hence, a flow-based router is introduced for dealing with realtime services with QoS requirements. This paper proposes a flow-based router using Intel IXP2800 network processors. By imposing flow-awareness into IXP2800, the proposed flow-based router has basic functionalities such as flow classification, flow maintenance, flow-based forwarding, and flow-based congestion resolution. And we analyze performance of the proposed flow-based router considering flow characteristics. The flow maintenance duration gives a great effect on its performance. Compared with the packet-based router using IXP2800 network processors, performance of the flow-based router is enhanced in terms of the packet processing time.