Internet applications are becoming increasingly resource intensive and perform poorly in the presence of significant congestion. Increased bandwidth cannot provide long-term congestion relief so Internet traffic must be prioritized and efficiently routed. Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) [12] provides the means to process traffic quickly and reserve resources for applications with specific requirements. However, MPLS must provide the same resilience mechanisms as ATM [18] over SONET [46] to become an acceptable alternative for assigning and switching label switched paths (LSPs). This thesis proposes a reconfigurable architecture and a prototype of a hardware processor for MPLS to improve its overall performance. Establishing LSPs and label management are the central tasks of the processor. It is used to describe LSPs and perform packet switching. A significant subset of RSVP-TE is implemented in the processor to provide the necessary mechanisms of a signaling protocol. Functionality is also available for Traffic Engineering (TE) allowing a user to configure the allocation of resources available for MPLS. The processor is designed to interact with software so it can become part of an embedded system. Results and analysis for the processor are provided describing its resource usage and performance. Resource intensive tasks are identified through analysis and determinations are made about the worst case performance improvement compared to software implementations which depend on the number of LSPs considered and network size.
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