On Traffic Characteristics and Low-Cost Router Design

Router is the key equipment in Internet and its cost is an important issue in network community. Line-speed processing is a fundamental rule in modern router design and it influence the router cost dramatically. By taking the real characteristics of Internet traffic into account, this paper proposes methods to lower the requirement of line-speed processing with a factor of g(<<1). Theoretical analysis and real world traffic trace simulation validate the new methods. In multimedia service oriented network the link rate will grow fast, thus the new methodology will work efficiently.