Case Study

7. TELECOM - High-Performance Router Design

Customer
The Company has changed the networking world by customizing router, firewall and VPN deployment in the same way that Linux customizing the operating system market. Each month more than 15,000 users worldwide download its open-source networking platform in their search for an alternative to over-priced products from proprietary vendors.

Challenge
Customer's router software with Linux kernel runs on X86 PC and the network flow is processed by the CPU. With the network flow growing, the CPU labors heavily and the network throughput becomes bottleneck. The general architecture can't meet the system's throughput requirements.

Service Delivered
We analyzed the project and selected UFE (Ultra Forwarding Engine) with an AISC chipset to process the network packet instead of a CPU according to the policy generated by CPU via UFE API. The UFE software defines which flow is trusted, which is untrusted, and downloads the info to the UFE under layer chip.

We defined the network flow through the gateway/router/firewall with 3 types: trusted flow, untrusted flow, and unknown flow. All the network flow was processed by CPU in the system based on x86 architecture. With UFE, only the unknown flow was processed by the CPU, a majority of trusted and untrusted flow was processed by UFE directly. UFE forwards the trusted flow and drops the untrusted flow. UFE can process a majority of the network flow itself. Of the whole flow, only a few of them were in the unknown flow category. So with the UFE unloading the CPU load, the total system performance was improved.