Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 1: Introduction

Overview

In recent years, there have been many announcements of new technologies that promise to change the way data is forwarded, or switched, in the Internet and other networks based on the Internet protocol suite. Many of these technologies are based on a set of common ideas. They all use a label swapping technique for forwarding data, the same technique that, not coincidentally, is used to forward data in ATM switches. Unlike ATM, however, all the techniques strive to maintain the control paradigm of the Internet protocol suite. They use IP addresses and standard Internet routing protocols such as OSPF and BGP. Thus in many respects they combine the best of ATM (fast, simple forwarding) with the best of IP (ubiquity, scalability, flexibility). All the approaches enable unmodified ATM switch hardware to be used as a router, given the addition of suitable software. There are also many significant differences between the approaches, such as the use of either data or control traffic to drive the establishment of forwarding state. Also, some of the approaches run only on ATM hardware, whereas some run on a wide variety of platforms including existing routers.

The first approach of this type to gain significant attention in the marketplace (although not the first to be publicly disclosed) was dubbed IP Switching by its inventors at the start-up company Ipsilon. Toshiba had previously described a similar scheme, implemented in their Cell Switching Router (CSR), and several other approaches were...

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Switching in IP Networks: IP Switching, Tag Switching, & Related Technologies

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Chapter 1: Introduction

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