Routing Engine Architecture for Next Generation Routers: Evolutional Trends

Abstract

The routing engine is the essential part of a router. As a software component, the routing engine is used to control the router activities and to build the data forwarding table. Along with the hardware evolution, several software generations for routing engines have been experienced. In this paper, we first review the different routing engine architectures over the time and their main components. In some previous papers, we have investigated new directions for routing engine development for next generation routers, where specific distributed architectures have been proposed for several routing protocols. Taking into account the increasing traffic in the core networks, we next propose a framework integrating all specific distributed routing protocol architectures in order to significantly improve the scalability of the next generation routers. Bottlenecks are reduced, resulting in improving both the overall performance and the resiliency in the presence of faults. The scalability of the proposed distributed framework is estimated with respect to each routing protocol.