A network processor-based fault-tolerance architecture for critical network equipments

Abstract

Businesses and individuals often suffer from significant amount of damage as a result of network failures, and that is why network fault tolerant mechanism is important for network design and management. The most common failure is happen to the network equipments. Moreover, network equipments located at the entrance of a network play an important role in the availability and reliability of the internal network. Therefore, we design and implement a fault-tolerant system especially for the network equipments located at the entrance of a network. On the situation that no redundant device exists, the fault-tolerant system could bypass the forwarding path to survive the network connections. We adopt the Intel IXDP1200 Network Processor as development platform to implement the proposed system. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.