Design and implementation of IPv6 packet forwarding engine for flow based router

In this paper, we present the design and implementation of IPv6 packet forwarding engine for flow based router which has the capability to handle several millions of flows at wire speed in high-speed networks. The IPv6 packet forwarding engine allows the improvement of both its performance and its flexibility with existing network processors. The functionality of the design has been tested using the VCS simulation package. The design has been implemented in a virtex4vlx100-ff1148 device. The simulation environment was made to verify the performance of this engine with the external 10G MAC and NSE modeling files. The simulation results show that the IPv6 packet forwarding function including the external look-up can be completed in 10 Gbps data rate with an minimum internal clock of 156.25 MHz under 64 bits parallel internal bus.