Overview of Cell Switch Router (CSR) and the CSR prototype system are described. CSR can simultaneously support both connection oriented IP flows and connectionless IP flows. CSR contains cell switch fabric and IP packet switch fabric to achieve high throughput IP forwarding. IP packets are forwarded either through a cut-thru packet transmission, in which packet are forwarded without reassembling IP packet nor IP header processing, or through a conventional hop-by-hop IP packet forwarding. This paper describes and proposes the mechanism to forward the connectionless IP packet flows at the CSR. A CSR prototype system has been developed. The CSR prototype system uses PVC connections to transfer the IP packets. With the CSR prototype system, we can make sure that CSR system can achieve a high throughput, i.e., 2.4 Gbps aggregated throughput. For end-to-end TCP/IP packet transmission, more than 90 Mbps can be achieved and realtime video transmission (30 Mbps video) can be achieved.

A novel cell-level FEC (forward error correction) scheme at SSCS of AAL type 5 for error-free data transmission services in ATM networks is proposed and evaluated. In the proposed cell-level FEC scheme, both the length of user data (e. g. , IP packet) and attached redundant data can be modified based on sender's local decision without any end-to-end parameter re-negotiation procedure. The writing and reading order regarding an interleave matrix for cell-level FEC algorithm are the same, in order to perform pipelining data transmission. The prototype implementation with software processing achieves few Mbps end-to-end throughput. The end-to-end data transmission latency and the amount of retransmission packets due to packet error at the receiver entity are evaluated by computer simulation with correlated cell dropping process. Simulation results show that the benefits of cell-level FEC scheme for the error-free data transmission services, i. e. , by use of cell-level FEC scheme, the amount of retransmitted packets can be reduced, even if the average latency for end-to-end data transmission increases slightly.

This paper proposes and performs the primary feasibility evaluation on Flow Attribute Notification Protocol (FANP), which is a protocol between neighbor CSR (Cell Switch Router) nodes for the management of cut-through packet forwarding, in order to apply label switching paradigm. In cut-through packet forwarding with label switching, a router doesn't have to perform conventional IP packet processing for the received packets. FANP indicates the mapping information between a data-link connection and a packet flow to the neighbor node. FANP defines two key procedures, i. e. , one is the VCID Notification Procedure, and the other is the Flow-ID Notification Procedure. The VCID Notification Procedure lets the label switching paradigm over the label swapped data-link, such as ATM link, though the other label switch architecture can not work over the label swapped data-link. The primary evaluation of FANP has been performed using the prototype system and with the actual packet statistics. The result shows that, with a corporate backbone level, the label switch router system with FANP would work well.