This paper investigates fast Packet Classification techniques, where a large routing table is divided into many much smaller tables by an index key at first; the resulting small tables are much easier to search. A traditional way is to use the front bits as the index key, but we show it's not an effective way to divide a routing table. In this paper, we propose three bit selection methods for division. They can be implemented by CAM or hash structure. Simulations show that the bit selection methods decrease the delay of classification 50% compared to the traditional method. We also propose an optimized method which is adapted to the biased traffic pattern, which shows 70% improvement in our simulation.

We have successfully applied Generalized Multiprotocol Label Switching (GMPLS) architecture to the Wavelength Assignment Photonic Switching System (WAPS) to create an internet access system that can provide, between terminals, not only conventional best-effort type of IP packet forwarding, but also high-speed and Quality of Service (QoS)-guaranteed IP forwarding. In this paper the system architecture, system specifications, and system hardware/software implementations are described.

Optical processing with efficient coding is expected in photonic label routing network. We consider optical codes encoded in the time and spectral domains. Wavelength-selective devices are useful for effective processing of such optical codes. In this study, collinear acoustooptic (AO) switches are investigated as a constituent elements of a wavelength selective correlator for optical BPSK codes. It is theoretically shown that the number of optical codes that can be distinguished is 2Nt-1, where Nt is the bit number of optical pulses. The device can also be used for recognition of codes encoded in time and spectral domains. Crosstalk in code recognition is discussed with numerical analysis considering AO filtering characteristics for optical processing with collinear AO devices.

The rapidly increasing bandwidth requirements of IP traffic mean that networks based on optical technologies in conjunction with IP routing technologies will provide the backbone of the next generation Internet. One of the major issues is how to construct an optical-technology-based backbone network that offers the economical transport of large-scale IP/MPLS services while achieving reliable, robust network. The key to achieving this objective lies in multilayer coordination technologies using Multi-Layer Service Network [MLSN] Architecture, that we previously proposed [2]. One of the important aspects of MLSN architecture is ability to effectively use GMPLS network resources by IP/MPLS service networks. We propose extensions to previously proposed MLSN architecture. The proposed extensions to MLSN architecture are tailored to address "service virtualization and separation" of various service networks over GMPLS backbone. As a part of this extended MLSN architecture, we introduce novel concepts known as Logical Router (LR) and Virtual Router (VR) that would enable border router to be services domain router, so that it can connect multiple service networks such as L2VPN, L3VPN etc., over GMPLS backbone by offering service separation or virtualization. This service separation/isolation greatly enhances the reliability of next generation networks, as any failure on one service should be isolated from others. We evaluate our extended network architecture against requirements for the large scale network targeting at introducing such new technology to cope with vast traffic explosion and challenges in operation and service provision sophistication.

To support multimedia applications effectively in mobile networks, the handover latency or packet losses during handover should be very small. Addressing this issue, we present a cooperative mobile router-based handover (CoMoRoHo) scheme for long-vehicular multihomed mobile networks. The basic idea behind CoMoRoHo is to enable different mobile routers to access different subnets during a handover and cooperatively receive packets destined for each other. In general, packet losses are directly proportional to handover latency; however, the overlapped reception of packets from different subnets makes possible to minimize packet losses even without reducing handover latency. To evaluate the scheme, we carried out performance modeling of the CoMoRoHo scheme in comparison with the Fast Handover for Mobile IPv6 (FMIPv6) protocol in regard to the handover latency, packet loss, signaling overhead, and packet delivery overhead in access networks. The analysis results show that CoMoRoHo outperforms FMIPv6 by reducing the packet losses as well as signaling overheads by more than 50%. Moreover, CoMoRoHo imposes lower packet delivery overheads required for preventing packets from being dropped from access routers. We thus conclude that CoMoRoHo is a scalable scheme because its performance remains intact even when the access network is overloaded.

We have developed an open-architecture router (OAR) prototype using industrial standard hardware, software components, and interfaces. The prototype is built with Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture (ATCA)-compliant hardware. Carrier-grade Linux (CGL) is used as the operating system. A new OAR configuration method is described where industrial standard hardware and software interfaces are used. Basic forwarding functions with routing protocol processing are demonstrated for the first time.

Live streaming is delay sensitive and can tolerate some amount of loss. The QoS Multicast for Live Streaming (QMLS) Protocol, focuses on the characteristics of live streaming. It has been shown to improve the performance of live streaming multicast by reducing the end-to-end packet loss probability. However, the placement of active routers performing the QMLS function has not been discussed. This paper proposes a dynamic method to activate and deactivate routers in order to minimize the number of active routers for each QMLS-packet flow and discusses its parameters. The results of an evaluation show that the proposed method can reduce the number of active routers for each flow and adjust the active routers according to changes in the multicast tree.

In this paper, we propose a protocol for multicast communication called Multicast Datagram Transfer Protocol (MDTP) to provide multicast for video broadcasting service on the Internet. MDTP is a one-to-many multicast communication protocol, which is constructed based on IPv4 unicast protocol by utilizing IP Router Alert Option, and it uses unicast addressing and unicast routing protocol. A mechanism is presented to allow a router to remove identical video stream, to duplicate a video stream, and to forward each copy of the duplicated video stream to its destinations. Ordinary IP routers that do not support MDTP will treat the MDTP packets as normal unicast packets. Hence, gradual deployment is possible without tunneling technique. With a delegation mechanism, MDTP router is also able to handle request from clients, and serve the requested video stream. The simulation results show that the average bandwidth usage of MDTP is close to the average bandwidth usage of IP multicast. MDTP also has greater efficiency than XCAST, and its efficiency becomes significant for a large number of clients.

Random Early Detection (RED), an active queue management scheme, has been recommended by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for the next generation routers. RED suffers from a number of performance problems, such as low throughput, large delay/jitter, and induces instability in networks. Many of the previous attempts to improve the performance of RED have been based on optimizing the values of the RED parameters. However, results have shown that such optimizations resulted in limited improvement in the performance. In this paper, we propose Double Slope RED (DSRED), a new active queue management scheme to improve the performance of RED. The proposed scheme is based on dynamically changing the slope of the packet drop probability curve as a function of the level of congestion in the buffer. Results show that our proposed scheme results in better performance than original RED.

The IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) has developed a Network Mobility (NEMO) basic support protocol by extending the operation of Mobile IPv6 to provide uninterrupted Internet connectivity to the communicating nodes of mobile networks. The protocol uses a mobile router (MR) in the mobile network to perform prefix scope binding updates with its home agent (HA) to establish a bi-directional tunnel between the HA and MR. This solution reduces location-update signaling by making network movements transparent to the mobile nodes behind the MR. However, delays in data delivery and higher overheads are likely to occur because of sub-optimal routing and multiple encapsulation of data packets. To resolve these problems, we propose a mobile router-assisted route optimization (MoRaRo) scheme for NEMO support. With MoRaRo, a mobile node performs route optimization with a correspondent node only once, at the beginning of a session. After that the MR performs route optimization on behalf of all active mobile nodes when the network moves. The virtue of this scheme is that it requires only slight modification of the implementation of the NEMO basic support protocol at local entities such as the MR and mobile nodes of the mobile network, leaving entities in the core or in other administrative domains untouched. MoRaRo enables a correspondent node to forward packets directly to the mobile network without any tunneling, thus reducing packet delay and encapsulation overheads in the core network. To enable the scheme to be evaluated, we present the results of both theoretical analysis and simulation.

An active network has the advantage of being able to accept new protocols quickly and easily. The cluster-based active router can provide sufficient computing power for customized computations. In the router architecture, load balancing is achieved by the efficient distribution of packets. We present a packet distribution scheme according to estimated processing time.

One of the main issues of Mobile IPv6 is handover latency that causes service disruption time. Although plenty of proposals significantly reduce the service disruption time, they suffer from redundant routing that causes packet misordering and bandwidth consumption during the process of inter-domain handover. In this paper, we propose a new scheme that minimizes the redundant routing during the process of inter-domain handover by utilizing forwarding routers for each correspondent node. Our proposed scheme consists of forwarding router discovery and proactive handover. We evaluate our proposed scheme in the view of packet misordering and bandwidth consumption, and clarify the efficiency of our proposed scheme. We also evaluate the impact of the forwarding routers' capacity since routers have limited resources. By strategically locating forwarding routers, e.g. next to the router that has peering to another domain, the redundant routing caused by inter-domain handover will be efficiently suppressed.

Recently, various types of traffic have increased on the Internet with the development of broadband networks. However, it is difficult to guarantee QoS for each traffic type in current network environments. Moreover, it has been reported that bandwidth can be allocated to flows unfairly, and this can be an important issue for QoS guarantees. Therefore, we have proposed a flow-based queue management scheme, called Dual Metrics Fair Queueing (DMFQ), to improve the fairness and QoS per flow. DMFQ discards arrival packets by considering not only the arrival rate per flow but also the flow succession time. In addition, we have confirmed the effectiveness of DMFQ through several computer simulations. In this paper, we implement DMFQ with hardware for high-speed operation. Concretely, we propose the design policies and show the hardware design results.

A novel cache-based packet-processing-engine (PPE) architecture that achieves low-power consumption and high packet-processing throughput by exploiting the nature of network traffic is proposed. This architecture consists of a processing-unit array and a bit-stream manipulation path called a burst stream path (BSP) that has a special cache mechanism called a process-learning cache (PLC). Network packets, which have the same information in their header, appear repeatedly over a short time. By exploiting that nature, the PLC memorizes the packet-processing method with all results (i. e. , table lookups), and applies it to other packets. The PLC enables most packets to skip the execution at the processing-unit array, which consumes high power. As a practical implementation of the cache-based PPE architecture, P-Gear was designed. In particular, P-Gear was compared with a conventional PPE in terms of silicon die size and power consumption. According to this comparison, in the case of current 0.13-µm CMOS process technology, P-Gear can achieve 100-Gbps (gigabit per second) packet-processing throughput with only 36.5% of the die size and 32.8% of the power consumption required by the conventional PPE. Configurations of both architectures for the 1- to 100-Gbps throughput range were also analyzed. In the throughput range of 10-Gbps or more, P-Gear can achieve the target throughput in a smaller die size than the conventional PPE. And for the whole throughput range, P-Gear can achieve a target throughput at lower power than the conventional PPE.

This paper proposes the hierarchical cloud-router network (HCRN) to overcome the scalability limit in a multi-layer generalized multi-protocol label switching (GMPLS) network. We define a group of nodes as a virtual node, called the cloud-router (CR). A CR consists of several nodes or lower-level CRs. A CR is modeled as a multiple switching capability (SC) node when it includes more than one kind of SC, which is fiber SC, lambda SC, time-division multiplexing (TDM) SC, packet SC, even if there are no actual multiple switching capability nodes in the CR. The CR advertises its abstracted CR internal structure, which is abstracted link state information inside the CR. A large-scale, multi-layer network can then achieve scalability by advertising the CR internal structure throughout the whole network. In this scheme, the ends of a link connecting two CRs are defined as interfaces of the CRs. We adopt the CR internal cost scheme between CR interfaces to abstract the network. This CR internal cost is advertised outside the CR via the interfaces. Our performance evaluation has shown that HCRN can handle a larger number of nodes than a normal GMPLS network. It can also bear more frequent network topology changes than a normal GMPLS network.

In this paper, we investigate packet loss and system dimensioning of feedback (FB) type wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optical routers under asynchronous and variable packet length self-similar traffic. We first study the packet loss performance for two different types of WDM optical routers under asynchronous and variable packet length self-similar traffic. Based on simulation results, we demonstrate that a 1616 FB type WDM optical router employing more than 4 re-circulated ports without using void filling (VF) algorithm has better performance. We then present the system dimensioning issues of FB type WDM optical routers, by showing the performance of FB type WDM optical routers as a function of the number of re-circulated ports, buffer depth, re-circulation limit, basic delay unit in the fiber delay line optical buffers and traffic characteristics. The sensitivity of the mutual effects of the above parameters on packet loss is investigated in details. Based on our results, we conclude that the FB type WDM optical routers must be dimensioned with the appropriate number of re-circulated ports, re-circulation limits, buffer depth, and optimal basic delay unit in the fiber delay line optical buffers under relevant traffic characteristics to achieve high switching performance.

The most important function of a router is to perform IP lookup that determines the output ports of incoming IP packets by their destination addresses. Hence, IP lookup is one of the main issues in implementing high-speed routers. The IP lookup algorithm implemented in IQ2200 Chipset with two-level table architecture can efficiently use memory. However, it wastes processor resource for full re-construction of the forwarding tables whenever every route insertion/deletion is requested. In order to improve the utilization of processor resource, we propose an IP lookup algorithm with three-level table architecture for high-speed routers. We evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm in terms of the memory size required for storing lookup information and the number of memory access in constructing forwarding tables. Being compared with the IQ2200 scheme, the proposed scheme can reduce the number of memory access up to 99% even though it needs about 16% more memory.

Various demands for next generation networks can be condensed into always-best-connected, ubiquitous, mobile, all-IP, application-aware, and converged networks. Vehicles have also come to be ubiquitous computing platforms associated with mobile communication functions. IPv6 has been introduced for all-IP ubiquitous communications. This paper proposes application-aware resource management for in-vehicle IPv6 networks, which are adaptive to different hardware configurations. We focus on power and bandwidth, since their management is critical for mobile communications. To manage these two critical resources, we identify the mobility characteristics and hardware configurations of in-vehicle networks. Based on these characteristics, we propose vehicle-aware power saving schemes. Our main idea for power saving is to dynamically adjust the mobile router (MR) advertisement interval and binding update lifetime. In addition, depending on the hardware configuration of the wireless environment, we propose two adaptive bandwidth management schemes using multihoming, which we refer to as best-connected MR selection based on location and high-data-rate MR selection based on priority. We evaluate the performance of our bandwidth management schemes by performing simulations, and that of our power saving schemes by mathematical analysis. Based on the results, it was found that the performance of each software scheme depends on the hardware configuration, so that an application-aware adaptive scheme is needed to optimize resource consumption.

In the last few years we have seen an explosion in the number of notebook computers and in the growth of the Internet. Mobile users expect to access the Internet's information resources and to communicate with other Internet users. The concept of Mobile IP is proposed to satisfy these demands. Using the base Mobile IP protocol, all datagrams destined for a mobile node are routed through that mobile node's home agent, which intercepts and tunnels each datagram to the mobile node's current location. This tunneling scheme creates a triangle routing problem, causing packets to travel through the home agent. In this paper, we propose that a Proxy Home Router (PHR) for routing performance improvement in a Mobile IP environment. One or more of Intermediate Systems (IS) on the route path between the correspondent node (CN) and the home agent (HA) are established as a PHR which then delivers packet instead of the home agent (HA). This PHR route optimization (PHR-RO) scheme has the following features. It is compatible with the base Mobile IP with existing Internet computers, and applications. Also, it is unnecessary for a CN to be modified in the proposed architecture. We also define Route Optimization messages in order to optimize route to a mobile node. Using these protocol extensions, a PHR may cache the binding information of a mobile node, and then tunnel their datagrams for the mobile node (MN) directly to the care-of address (CoA), bypassing the mobile node's home agent (HA). To analyze the performance of our PHR route optimization (PHR-RO) scheme, we propose a simulation model and show how to improve routing performance. Through this performance analysis, we conclude that the route optimization with a proxy home router (PHR) has better performance in terms of the end-to-end delay and TCP throughput.

This paper proposes "Handover with Proactive Anchor Router Relocation and Data Buffering" to suppress packet loss and packet miss-ordering during handover. To prevent packet miss-ordering, anchor router is proactively relocated to the optimal position before the mobile terminal performs handover. And, to eliminate packet loss during handover, anchor router buffers the packet only during handover. Moreover, anchor router assigns sequential numbers to the buffered packets to eliminate duplicate packet reception. Simulation results show that our proposal eliminates packet miss-ordering and duplicate reception while preventing packet loss.