The Bay Bridge: A High Speed Bridge/Router

The Bay Bridge is a high performance bridge/router capable of bridging and routing over 100,000 packets per second between two network ports. The first prototype provides a platform for the investigation of very high speed bridging and routing in hardware. High throughput is achieved by a specialised processor: The Protocol Converter, a programmable device for translating between network protocols and making forwarding/routing decisions. The first implementation is an encapsulating two-port remote bridge with two network interfaces: FDDI rings are interconnected via the public SMDS network operating at the SONET STS-3c or DS3 rate. The first IEEE 802.6/D15 conformant DQDB MAC chip operating at STS-3c and DS3 rates has been developed as part of this project. Plug-in replacement SMDS interfaces have been designed for each rate. The architecture is split into four main blocks: the Bridge Board, the SMDS Interface, the FDDI Interface and the Host Interface. Each architectural block is described in turn. Finally, a schematic design is presented for a multi-port hardware router based on an ATM-switch backplane. The Bay Bridge Project Report: 12 Revision: 2.0 Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences University of California at Berkeley