Enhanced router bypass using fine granularity transport channels

Internet traffic has been growing year-after-year for decades, but processing all that traffic through traditional IP routers has become an obstacle to further expansion. Router bypass has been introduced recently to overcome capacity limitations and processing costs of IP routers. With router bypass, a portion of traffic is provisioned to bypass the traditional router and is instead switched by the transport layer. Router bypass has been shown to potentially provide a significant savings in network costs, but these advantages are limited by a reduction in statistical multiplexing associated with the subdivision of available bandwidth into typically two distinct portions. This criticism has limited interest in bypass techniques. In parallel, G.709 Optical Transport Network (OTN) [1] technology with its recently introduced features such as direct support for packet (i.e., Generic Framing Procedure) and the Hitless Adjustment (HAO) have paved the way for a more dynamic and finer granularity transport layer. In this paper, we explore the impact of exploiting this finer granularity of provisioned bypass bandwidth and provisioning time on the efficacy of router bypass techniques. An OMNET++ simulation show that with finer bypassing granularity throughput can be enhanced up to 13% and packet drops can be reduced by up to 30%.