Packets or ports: the decisions of IP switching

One of the most important network elements in the Internet are the routers which do relaying of IP packets. Because of growth of the Internet routers currently experience serious problems in relaying traffic in a satisfying speed. The idea of switching Internet traffic flows has recently been introduced and a new technology called IP switching has emerged. Several differing technological solutions have been suggested. In this paper we describe and compare two methods in flow-based IP switching to make the decisions whether to switch internet traffic flows to separate ATM-connections. Traffic measurements are made in two networks of varying size and based on a specific three-stage flow analysis we suggest that the decision to switch should be made as flexible as possible due to the expected diversity of traffic profiles in different parts of the network. This way the optimal service cluster could be switched and router resources could be optimally utilized. A simple model to determine workload to an IP switch is introduced. Using this model we see that the workload of the flow setup component and the routing component may be optimized, if we use flexible methods to determine the flows that are to be separately switched.