Abstract

With the ever accelerating growth of the Internet, more traffic is being forwarded across the Internet than ever before. Hundreds of new hosts are being installed everyday and the applications running across the Internet are increasing steadily. All of this growth has created a need for Internet-class IP routers that are capable of handling the IP address scaling concerns of the Internet, as well as providing wire-speed performance for both traditional traffic and for newer applications.

Torrent Networking Technologies Corp. commissioned The Tolly Group to evaluate the Fast Ethernet, IP-routing performance of its IP9000 Gigabit Router. The IP9000 is a member of this new class of routers that are designed to handle Internet traffic and are specifically architected for extremely large IP networks.

Unlike traditional IP routers, the IP9000 has the capability to maintain and quickly search huge route tables, enabling it to forward packets at wire speed to millions of hosts on thousands of networks. It also has the capability to transmit multicast IP packets to more than 65,000 multicast groups without penalizing performance. This scalable solution will help facilitate deployment of multicast applications such as video over the Internet.

The Tolly Group ran a series of SmartBits tests to benchmark the IP9000’s capabilities in a variety of network environments including both unicast and multicast configurations. In the configurations tested, the IP9000 forwarded traffic streams across Fast Ethernet connections at wire speed while providing routing services to the network. Initially, The Tolly Group subjected the IP9000 to multistream layer 3 IP routing throughput and latency tests for both unicast and multicast traffic.

In addition, engineers ran a series of tests that explored the performance of the router when forwarding traffic in large network address spaces and in Internet-scale multicast environments. Testing was performed in March 1998.