Performance comparison of layer 3 switches in cases of flow- and topology-driven connection setup

The layer 3 switch enables us to transmit IP datagrams fast using the cut-through technique. There are mainly two cases in establishing connections; one is the flow-driven case and the other is the topology-driven one. In this paper, we analyze the cut-through rate, the datagram waiting time and the mis-order rate as performance measure of both cases and compare these performances. In the analysis, by using interrupted Bernoulli process (IBP), we model the arrival process of IP flow and IP datagram from each source. Furthermore, we investigate impacts of the arrival rate and the average IP flow length on the performance.