Performance Analysis of Ip Switching and Tag Switching

Abstract

To cope with exponential growth of traffic on the Internet, IP networks require routers capable of much higher performance capabilities. This has led to interest in combining speed of layer-2 switching with scalability of layer-3 routing, leading to the generation of layer3 switches. Various technologies like IP, tag and Multi-Protocol Label Switching are being developed to provide these features by performing IP routing over ATM. In this paper we perform several experiments to analyze and compare the performance of IP switching and tag switching on networks comprising traditional IP routers running over an ATM backbone. Using network traces we compare the performance gains of IP switching to the gains obtained from tag switching. Our findings indicate that performance of IP switching is dependent on flow classification parameters and router speed. Also we find that there are higher performance gains with tag switching at the cost of moderately higher resource usage.