Simulation Analysis for Verifying an Implementation Method of Higher-performed Packet Routing

As inter-network traffics grows rapidly, the router systems as a network component becomes to be capable of not only wire-speed packet processing but also plentiful programmability for quality services. A network processor technology is widely used to achieve such capabilities in the high-end router. Although providing two such capabilities, the network processor can't support a deep packet processing at nominal wire-speed. Considering QoS may result in performance degradation of processing packet. In order to achieve foster processing, one chipset of network processor is occasionally not enough. Using more than one urges to consider a problem that is, for instance, an out-of-order delivery of packets. This problem can be serious in some applications such as voice over IP and video services, which assume that packets arrive in order. It is required to develop an effective packet processing mechanism leer using more than one network processors in parallel in one linecard unit of the router system. Simulation analysis is also needed for verifying the mechanism. We propose the packet processing mechanism consisting of more than two NPs in parallel. In this mechanism, we use a load-balancing algorithm that distributes the packet traffic load evenly and keeps the sequence, and then verify the algorithm with simulation analysis. As a simulation tool, we use DEVSim++, which is a DEVS formalism-based hierarchical discrete-event simulation environment developed by KAIST. In this paper, we are going to show not only applicability of the DEVS formalism to hardware modeling and simulation but also predictability of performance of the load balancer when implemented with FPGA.