Wire-speed traffic management in Ethernet switches

Price advantage and ease of provisioning of Ethernet over ATM is spurring the deployment of traditional Ethernet switches in Access Networks. Fast Ethernet (FE) and Gigabit Ethernet (GE) switches for enterprise LANs lack traffic management (TM) features making them unsuitable for widespread QoS enabled Access Networks deployment. In this paper, we present efficient hardware architectures for Ethernet switches to implement wire speed packet classification, bandwidth policing and rate shaping. The Packet Classification Engine can support configurable multi-dimensional classification at 15Mpackets/s. These hardware structures have been incorporated into Infineon Technologies' configurable 8G Ethernet 'Switch-on-a-chip' (PLB2800) and fabricated using 0.18 /spl mu/m technology.