10 standard layer-3 Switch Technology (hot spot)

10 standard layer-3 switch technology hotspots), layer-3 switches basically have all the functions of traditional switches. The layer-3 switches shall prevail. The specific technical implementation of switches includes distributed pipelines, dynamic and Scalable Memory.

Layer 3 switch technology: programmable ASIC

ASIC is a dedicated Integrated Circuit dedicated to optimizing Layer 2 processing. It is the core of today's networking solutions and integrates multiple functions on one chip, it has the advantages of simple design, high reliability, low power consumption, higher performance and lower cost.

Layer 3 switch technology: distributed Pipeline

With the distributed pipeline, multiple distributed forwarding engines can quickly send data packets independently. In a single pipeline, multiple ASIC chips simultaneously process multiple frames. This concurrency and pipeline improves the forwarding performance to a new level: On-Demand Unicast, Broadcast, and Multicast on all ports.

Layer-3 switch technology: dynamically Scalable Memory

For advanced LAN switching products, the real performance is built on an intelligent storage system. The layer-3 Switch directly associates a portion of the memory with the forwarding engine. More interface modules are added, including their respective forwarding engines, and memory is also expanded accordingly. It also uses streamlined ASIC processing to dynamically construct the cache, which increases the memory usage. The system can also handle large burst data streams without packet loss.

Layer 3 switch technology: Advanced queue mechanism

Even if the network device has outstanding performance, it will be damaged by the congestion on the connected network segment. Traditionally, the traffic through a port must be stored in the cache of only one output queue. No matter how high its priority is, it must also be processed in the first-in-first-out mode.

When the queue is full, any excess parts will be discarded. In addition, when the queue grows, the latency also increases. This feature makes it very difficult to run real-time transaction processing and multimedia applications on Traditional Ethernet. For this reason, many network device manufacturers have developed new technologies that provide different service levels on an Ethernet segment and control latency and jitter at the same time. In this way, the mechanism of queues of different levels is introduced for each port.

This queue can better distinguish different traffic levels to match the network closer to high-performance applications. Data packets such as multimedia and real-time data streams are put into high-priority queues. The Weighted Fair queuing algorithm can be used to manage high-priority queues more frequently, but it does not ignore low-priority queues. Users of traditional applications do not notice changes in response time and throughput, while those who use emergency applications receive timely responses.

Layer 3 switch technology: Automatic traffic classification

Some data streams are more important than other data streams. With Automatic traffic classification, the layer-3 switch can instruct the data packet assembly line to differentiate user-specified data streams to achieve low-latency, high-priority transmission, and avoid congestion.

Layer 3 switch technology: Smart permission Control

The layer-3 Switch provides multiple security mechanisms and uses a traffic classifier. administrators can restrict any identified data streams, including restricting access to servers and eliminating useless protocol broadcasts. This is a breakthrough in the network technology field, that is, providing a line rate firewall.

Layer 3 switch technology: Dynamic Traffic Monitoring

Traffic classification, priority processing, and resource retention enable enterprise network and Intranet administrators to focus on more important things, that is, traditional and next-generation applications. But one thing still needs to be done is traffic monitoring. Traffic monitoring is not a policy mechanism because it is actually a protection mechanism. It monitors traffic and network congestion conditions and responds dynamically to these conditions to ensure that all network elements end users and networks themselves are under control and can run best.

Many layer-3 switches use a service level of P to prioritize congested LAN. To avoid congestion, the high-performance Layer-3 Switch even uses more advanced technologies to dynamically monitor the size of the output queue, so as to detect whether a port will become congested. By controlling the queue size and congestion, the network can maintain the limit required for latency-sensitive data streams.

Layer-3 switch technology: scalable RMON implementation

RMON support has become an indispensable part of active and extensive network management. The MIB defined in RFC1757 contain statistics on both the physical layer and the MAC layer. The RMON2 defined in RFC2021 extends the collection of statistics to the network layer.

Layer 3 switch technology: vector Processing Technology

Vector processing technology is used to accelerate the processing speed of data frames. The architecture of the layer-3 Switch not only adds the control capability of the layer-3 on the layer-2, but also adds multi-faceted vector control, thus greatly enhancing the vector processing function. Layer-3 vswitches have many advantages in vector processing:

◆ Fast Frame processing speed. With ASIC-based data packet classification, forwarding, and interpretation technologies, frame decoding by software is minimized, this method can achieve much higher performance.

◆ Highly adaptive function control. Vector processing works with programmable ASIC to support future standards with minimal overhead. For example, IPv6 support is already part of Vector Logic.

◆ Enhanced management functions. Multidimensional vector processing also includes built-in Network Management Agents and RMON.

Layer-3 switch technology: Multi-RISC processor

In highly reliable vswitches, a dedicated high-performance RISC processor is absolutely required. In fact, the combination of frame Processing Unit (FP) and Vector Logic provides unparalleled performance. An independent application processor AP) can assist FP. Like FP, AP is also a high-performance CPU. AP controls all operations except Frame Forwarding: High-Level bridging and routing, such as Spanning Tree and OSPF protocols, as well as SNMP and HTTP operations.

The advantage of using AP and FP is obvious, because management and computing work does not affect data forwarding, thus achieving high throughput and low latency. Through the above layer-3 switch technology analysis, we can easily see that high performance, security, ease of use, manageability, stackability, service quality and fault tolerance are the technical features of the current switch.