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Rethinking Router Complexity for Improved Network Performance

Are routers too complex despite their supposed simplicity? Explore the evolving requirements and challenges affecting router performance. Learn about key features like multicast, IPv6, latency, and more that impact routing efficiency.

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Rethinking Router Complexity for Improved Network Performance

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  1. Weren’t routers supposed to be simple? ICSI May 8th, 2002 Nick McKeown Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Stanford University nickm@stanford.edu www.stanford.edu/~nickm

  2. Background • We tell our students that Internet routers are simple. All routers do is make a forwarding decision, update a header, then forward packets to the correct outgoing interface. • But I don’t understand them anymore. • List of required features is huge and still growing, • Software is complex and unreliable, • Hardware is complex and power-hungry, • Yet still the throughput is less than 100%.

  3. Outline • What limits the performance of a router • What are the basic requirements • Basic functions: RFC 1812 • Throughput • 0.25s of Buffering • What are the “new” requirements • Multicast • IPv6 • DiffServ, IntServ, priorities, WFQ etc. • Latency • Packet sequence • Others: Drop policies, VPNs, ACLs, DOS traceback, measurement, statistics, … • What might be possible

  4. Header Processing Lookup IP Address Update Header Queue Packet Data Hdr Data Hdr IP Address Next Hop Address Table Buffer Memory 1M prefixes Off-chip DRAM 1M packets Off-chip DRAM Generic router architecture

  5. Header Processing Header Processing Header Processing Lookup IP Address Lookup IP Address Lookup IP Address Update Header Update Header Update Header Address Table Address Table Address Table Generic router architecture Queue Packet 1 1 Buffer Memory 2 2 Queue Packet Buffer Memory Scheduler Queue Packet N N Buffer Memory

  6. Router linecard OC192c linecard Lookup Tables Buffer & State Memory Optics Packet Processing Buffer Mgmt & Scheduling Physical Layer Framing & Maintenance Buffer Mgmt & Scheduling • 30M gates • 2.5Gbits of memory • 2 square feet • $25k cost, $200k price. Buffer & State Memory Scheduler

  7. Router vital statistics Cisco GSR 12416 Juniper M160 19” 19” Capacity: 160Gb/sPower: 4.2kW Capacity: 80Gb/sPower: 2.6kW 6ft 3ft 2ft 2.5ft

  8. DWDM Link speed x2/8 months Internet x2/yr Router capacity x2.2/18 months Moore’s law x2/18 m DRAM access rate x1.1/18 m

  9. Write Rate, R One 40B packet every 8ns Read Rate, R One 40B packet every 8ns • Use SRAM? + Fast enough random access time, but • Too low density to store 10Gbits of data. • Use DRAM? + High density means we can store data, but • Can’t meet random access time. An Example: Packet buffers40Gb/s router linecard 10Gbits Buffer Memory Buffer Manager

  10. An Example: Packet processing CPU Instructions per minimum length packet since 1996

  11. (and implement some new features too) Will we need faster routers? If in 10 years we have a 210 = 1024-fold increase in capacity of the Internet, we won’t have 1024 times as much POP space to hold the routers, 1024 times as many batteries, 1024 times as many fans.

  12. Outline • What limits the performance of a router • What are the basic requirements • Basic functions: RFC 1812 • Throughput • 0.25s of Buffering • What are the “new” requirements • Multicast • IPv6 • DiffServ, IntServ, priorities, WFQ etc. • Latency • Packet sequence • Others: Drop policies, VPNs, ACLs, DOS traceback, measurement, statistics, … • What might be possible

  13. Can’t I just use N separate memory devices per output? output 1 R R R R N The Problem • Output queued switches are impractical R R R R DRAM data NR NR

  14. Potted history • [Karol et al. 1987] Throughput limited to by head-of-line blocking for Bernoulli IID uniform traffic. • [Tamir 1989] Observed that with “Virtual Output Queues” (VOQs) Head-of-Line blocking is reduced and throughput goes up.

  15. Potted history • [Anderson et al. 1993] Observed analogy to maximum size matching in a bipartite graph. • [M et al. 1995] (a) Maximum size match can not guarantee 100% throughput.(b) But maximum weight match can – O(N3). • [Mekkittikul and M 1998] A carefully picked maximum size match can give 100% throughput. • [Prabhakar and Dai 2000] 100% throughput possible for maximal matching with a speedup of two. Matching O(N2.5)

  16. Different weight functions, incomplete information, pipelining. IQ + VOQ, Maximum weight matching 100% [Various] Randomized algorithms 100% [Tassiulas, 1998] 100% [M et al., 1995] IQ + VOQ, Maximal size matching, Speedup of two. 100% [Dai & Prabhakar, 2000] IQ + VOQ, Sub-maximal size matching e.g. PIM, iSLIP. Throughput results Theory: Input Queueing (IQ) 58% [Karol, 1987] Practice: Input Queueing (IQ) Various heuristics, distributed algorithms, and amounts of speedup

  17. Outline • What limits the performance of a router • What are the basic requirements • Basic functions: RFC 1812 • Throughput • 0.25s of Buffering • What are the “new” requirements • Multicast: queues, bandwidth, backpressure, lookups, dropping. • IPv6 • DiffServ, IntServ, priorities, WFQ etc. • Latency: 125us, pipelines,“cell size”. • Packet sequence: parallelism and load-balancing. • Others: Drop policies, VPNs, ACLs, DOS traceback, measurement, statistics, … • What might be possible

  18. What might be possible Router 1 rate, R rate, R 1 1 2 rate, R rate, R N N k Bufferless

  19. Characteristics • Advantages • kh a memory bandwidth i • kh a lookup/classification rate i • kh a routing/classification table size i • Problems • Throughput • Multicast • Packet order • Latency • Priorities and QoS

  20. 1 1 N N Intriguing possibilityTwo-stage Load-Balancing Router External Inputs External Outputs Buffers 1 N Recently shown to maximize throughput [C.S.Chang et al.: http://www.ee.nthu.edu.tw/~cschang/PartI.pdf]

  21. Optical two-stage router Linecards Lookup Phase 1 Buffer 1 Lookup Buffer 2 Phase 2 Lookup Buffer 3

  22. 100’s of Tb/s router projectMark Horowitz, David Miller, Olav Solgaard, Nick McKeown Passive Optical Switch Electronic Linecard #1 Electronic Linecard #625 160- 320Gb/s 160- 320Gb/s 40Gb/s • Line termination • IP packet processing • Packet buffering • Line termination • IP packet processing • Packet buffering 40Gb/s 160Gb/s 40Gb/s 40Gb/s (100Tb/s = 625 * 160Gb/s)

  23. What Hurts • Maintaining packet order • Buffering packets in external DRAM What Seems Impractical • Low latency • Multicast • Delay guarantees

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