A distributed and scalable RSVP-TE architecture for next generation IP routers

Routers, whose main tasks include forwarding and best route computing, have undergone several design architectures in the last years in order to deal with the explosion of traffic in the Internet. Next generation routers are made with enhanced memory capacity and computing resources, distributed across a very high speed switching fabric. However, the current routing software products, particularly those built by third party developers, are not able to fully exploit the new hardware platform of these routers due to their centralized architectures with a solely control card being responsible for all routing and management tasks. This paper proposes a first fully distributed software architecture of the RSVP-TE module for next generation routers in order to scale with the stringent requirements of the MPLS signaling. The components of the current centralized architecture of RSVP-TE module are offloaded onto line cards in order to share the load between the control card and the line cards. Such a distributed architecture meets the scalability requirements, e.g., high volume of traffic of next generation routers. The robustness and resiliency are also improved. We propose an estimation of the scalability of the distributed RSVP-TE architecture based on the CPU utilization.