[Building a Model of Packet Routing using MATLAB]

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Abstract

The partition of a system into parallel elements to scale the system in size and capacity is widely used by the research community. The idea to divide a large and central memory in shared-memory-based switching systems into an array of parallel memory modules to reduce the memory-bandwidth requirements seems like a reasonable idea. However, scaling a shared-memory-based switching system has becomes an extremely challenging task that the research community has focused in other approaches to build high-speed and large-size Internet router and switches. In this dissertation, the sliding-window (SW) packet-switching architecture is presented as a truly scalable shared-memory-based switching system. The SW packet-switching architecture is not a new idea. The SW packet-switching architecture is a novel approach that combines the memory utilization of a shared-memory switch and the parallel operation of the memory modules in an input-queued switch. This dissertation showshow to achieve the potential of the SW packet-switching architecture with algorithms that have linear complexity as the SW switching system is scaled in size. In this dissertation, algorithms for the SW packet-switching architecture are elaborated and evaluated. Previously unaddressed topics such as the memory efficiency and the effects of varying the window size are investigated. One of the main results is that the window size can be expanded to obtain better performance of the SW packet-switching architecture by having more memory modules in parallel and/or a larger speedup factor in the memory modules. Also, the SW packet-switching architecture is modified in this dissertation to support priority switching for various traffic classes and multicasting to handle point-to-multipoint communications.

Table of Contents

ABSTRACT2

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION1

Purpose of the study3

Optical Transmission Technologies3

Using Matlab as a scripting language4

II. THE SLIDING-WINDOW PACKET-SWITCHING ARCHITECTURE5

III. ALGORITHMS FOR THE SLIDING-WINDOW PACKET SWITCH23

IV. PRIORITY SWITCHING AND MULTICASTING45

V. CONCLUSION58

BIBLIOGRAPHY59

Chapter 1: Introduction

The Internet has enjoyed tremendous success in the last several decades, evolving from a small research network to an interconnection of multiple networks operated by government, industry, academia, and private parties. The exponential growth in the number of users from 1995 to 2010 is shown in Figure 1.1

The growing demand for bandwidth-intensive multimedia services, such as online video games, videoconferencing, and voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) indicates the continuation of this growth trend. The proliferation of access bandwidths offered by technologies has led to the mushrooming of many new web applications, from traditional search to online interactive maps, social networks, office software, video streaming, mobile Internet, and so on.

Widely popular applications are running in datacenters that are transparent to end users. Datacenter computing and content streaming are becoming more and more popular, and are rapidly growing. (Cheyns et al, 2009:114-121) This trend is driving a transformation of our modern Internet as shown in Figure 1.2. The hierarchical view of the early Internet (Figure 1.2a) showed a few large core service providers at the top level providing backbone interconnects to the regional access providers and local Internet service providers (ISPs) at the lower levels of the hierarchy. Today's Internet, which is shown in Figure ...