DiffServ Edge Routers over Network Processors:Implementation and Evaluation:Network processors are emerging as a programmable alternative to the traditional ASICbased
solutions in scaling up the data plane processing of network services. This
work, rather than proposing new algorithms, illustrates the process of, and examines
the performance issues in, prototyping a DiffServ edge router with IXP1200. The
external benchmarks reveal that although the system can scale to wire speed of 1.8
Gb/s in simple IP forwarding, the throughput declines to 180–290 Mb/s when Diff-
Serv is performed due to the double bottlenecks of SRAM and microengines.
Through internal benchmarks, the performance bottleneck was found to be able to
shift from one place to another given different network services and algorithms. Most
of the results reported here should be applicable to other NPs since they have similar
architectures and components.