On Growth of Parallelism within Routers and Its Impact on Packet Reordering

The network link speeds increase at a higher rate compared to processing speeds. This coupled with the increase in size of router tables demand higher levels of parallelism within router hardware. However, such parallelism introduces unintended consequences that potentially may negate some of the performance gains provided by the improved technology. The growth trends of computing speeds, link speeds, and routing table sizes are used to evaluate one such consequence, packet reordering within routers. Results presented show the trends related to the degree of hardware parallelism and packet reordering.