Scalable IP switching based on optical interconnect

摘要

IP traffic on the INternet and enterprise networks has been growing exponentially in the last several years, and much attention is being focused on the use of IP multicast for real-time and multimedia applications. The current soft and general-purpose CPU-based routers face great stress since they have great latency and low forwarding speeds. Based on the ASICs, layer 2 switching provides high-speed packet forwarding. Integrating high-speed of Layer 2 switching with the flexibility of Layer 3 routing, Layer 3 switching (IP switching) has been put forward in order to avoid the performance bottleneck associated with Layer 3 forwarding.