The Load-Balanced Router

This book is about the load-balanced router, a routerarchitecture that is scalable and can guarantee afull capacity. A load-balanced router consists of twostages. First, a load-balancing stage spreadsarriving packets equally among linecards. Then, aforwarding stage transfers packets from the linecardsto their final destination. A load-balanced routerdoes not use any centralized scheduler, as mostcurrent router architectures. Therefore, it can scalewhile providing the throughput guarantees needed bynetwork operators. It this book, we show how to implement theload-balanced router using a single passive opticalswitch fabric with no reconfigurations, whilecurrent routers commonly need switch fabrics withfast reconfiguration times. Further, we introduce asimple distributed algorithm that can avoid packetreordering, a common problem of load-balancedarchitectures. Finally, we present a practical switchfabric architecture that would enable load-balancedrouters to scale to higher numbers of interfaces. Weconclude by showing that the load-balanced router canhelp provide the scalability and capacity guaranteesneeded in the Internet.