Design and operation of RDMA based routing architecture

Abstract

Internet, a connection of networks has unified the world with no boundaries and limitations. It fulfilled the dream of being virtually present in any part of the world within no time. Over the years internet spanned into every corner of the world and a tremendous growth in the use of internet had been noticed. Internet, with its numerous advantages and support of wide variety of applications has leaded the consumer demand for more bandwidth and high availability to meet his requirements. Addressing these factors great development has taken place in recent years in the field of network technologies. A new era of Gigabit and Terabit Ethernet technologies signify the developments that address the growing demands. With the development in Ethernet technologies the demand for new router architectures that could process the data at gigabit rates also has increased. Many different router architectures have been proposed and implemented to meet these requirements. In this thesis, different router architectures have been studied and explained in detail. Many factors that affect the performance of the router have been reviewed and solutions to overcome the limitations have been addressed in detail. Addressing the solutions for limitations seen in legacy router architectures, the author presents the design, operation of a proposed new routing architecture [16]. The proposed architecture introduces the operation of RDMA into router architecture to minimize the processing and forwarding delay, which improves the performance of routers. The operation of an RDMA enabled router and the operation between two RDMA enabled routers have been clearly explained. The author also presents the mathematical models for evaluating the delay within a router and between two routers, processor utilization and memory utilization for both the legacy and RDMA enabled router architectures. In order to understand the router operation in detail and to enable future researchers to work on router architecture, a simulator with router operation has been built for both the router architectures. The results show that the proposed architectural operation improves the performance of routers even in heavy traffic networks.