High Performance IP Fowarding Engine for ATM based Gigabit Routers

In this paper, we proposed high performance packet forwarding engine for asynchronous transfer mode(ATM) based gigabit routers. The forwarding engine is based on ATM switch and accommodates four 622Mbps ports. The forwarding engine has been designed to be able to process the Intemet protocol(IP) packet at 2.5Gbps using the pipelined If header processing and lookup control mechanism. For high performance packet forwarding, we used content addressable memory(CAM) based routing coprocessor operating in hardware and implemented the pipelined lookup control function into a field programmable gate array(FPGA). The pipelined packet header processing mechanism enhanced the forwarding performance of the If packets ingressed from four different 622Mbps ports. Moreover, the If lookup controller designed to have the performance up to 12.5Mpps. The proposed forwarding engine is also designed to support differentiated services(DS) and multiprotocol label switching(MPLS).