A Shortest Path Processor for Traffic Engineering of VPN Services

The shortest path problem is common in many different fields (transportation systems, mechanical systems, etc). Most of the telecommunication industry protocols such as PNNI, OSPF and IISP use Dijkstra’s algorithm or Bellman-Ford’s algorithm to solve the shortest path problem. Today, the majority of the shortest path computations are performed in software, which is inefficient for real-time applications that are sensitive to delay. This paper proposes a hardware architecture for a shortest path processor that reduces computation time to improve delay.