Trends in Routers

Traditional routers perform a series of complex operations when forwarding each packet, including route lookup, access control list matching, address resolution, priority management, and other additional operations. These operations greatly affect the performance and efficiency of the router, reduce the packet forwarding rate and forwarding throughput, and increase the burden on the CPU. The correlation between the front and back packets passing through the router is large, and the packets with the same destination address and source address often arrive continuously, which provides a possibility and basis for the fast forwarding of the packet. The new generation of routers, such as IP Switch, Tag Switch, etc., uses this design idea to use hardware to achieve fast forwarding, which greatly improves the performance and efficiency of the router.
The new generation of routers uses forwarding caching to simplify forwarding operations for packets. In the fast forwarding process, only the first few packets of a group of packets with the same destination address and source address need to be processed for traditional route forwarding, and the destination address, source address, and next gateway address (next router address) of the successfully forwarded packet are put into the forwarding cache. If the destination address and source address of the packet match the forwarding cache, it is directly forwarded according to the next gateway address in the forwarding cache, without going through traditional complex operations, which greatly reduces the burden on the router, thereby achieving the goal of improving the throughput of the router.