Development of a Diversified Router for Experimental Research in Networking

Jon Turner


Overview: The purpose of this project is to develop a diversified
router platform to enable networking researchers to more easily
construct experimental networks that explore new and potentially
disruptive architectural innovations. A diversified network consists
of a shared infrastructure or substrate, on which multiple
metanetworks can co-exist. The planned diversified router platform is
a key building block for such a network, and provides a variety of
processing resources that can be used to implement diverse
metarouters. The diversified router substrate enables these resources
to be configured on behalf of individual metarouters, and provides the
isolation to allow the metarouters to co-exist, without interference.
The system architecture is highly scalable and can support metarouters
with IO capacities ranging from 10 Mb/s to 100 Gb/s. The architecture
provides great flexibility in the ratio of processing capacity to IO,
and can support system configurations in which this ratio is an order
of magnitude larger than in conventional routers.

Deliverables: We plan to implement a prototype of the diversified
router platform, including the control software to configure and
manage the various system components, as well as several metarouters
that demonstrate its operation. The prototype system will be
constructed from subsystem level components compatible with the
Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (ATCA). It will
include both General-purpose Processing Engines (GPE), which run a
conventional operating system and provide a standard application
development environment, and Network Processing Engines (NPE) that
offer substantially higher performance.

Status. Our initial development system consists of a five slot ATCA
chassis hosting two GPEs (each of these is a dual Xeon server blade)
and two NPEs (these each have two IXP 2850 network processors), all
connected through a 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch blade with VLAN
support, which is used to provide metarouter isolation. We have
developed software for the NPEs that implements multiple IPv4
metarouters, and can be extended to support non-IP metarouters. We
have also developed the NPE software for a Line Card, which provides
IO interfaces to external links and traffic isolation among the
metalinks sharing each interface.
We are currently in the process of integrating the NPE software
components and completing the configuration control software. The
intital version of the system is designed to operate as a Planet Lab
node, and will use the Planet Lab control software to define user
slices, implemented as Vservers running in the GPEs. This will be
augmented by mechanisms that allow users to define a fast-path running
in the NPEs, that they can control from their Vservers.

Demonstrations. We expect to demonstrate the initial Planet lab
version of the system by the end of 2006. We plan to follow this up
with a version of the system that is compatible with VINI. We expect
to be able to demonstrate a VINI-compatible system in the first half
of 2007. In addition, we plan to assemble a larger system
configuration in the first half of 2007 (a 14 slot chassis), to enable
construction of higher performance metarouters.

Relationship to GENI. The diversified router platform is intended to
serve as a prototype for the GENI backbone platform. The GENI version
will require higher level control software that is compatible with
GENI and will require changes to the NPE software to accommodate
GENI-specific protocols and packet formats.