A folded pipeline network processor architecture for 100 Gbit/s networks

Ethernet, although initially conceived as a Local Area Network technology, has been steadily making inroads into access and core networks. This has led to a need for higher link speeds, which are now reaching 100 Gbit/s. Packet processing at this rate represents a significant challenge, that needs to be met efficiently, while minimizing power consumption and chip area. This level of throughput favours a pipelined approach, thus this paper takes a traditional pipeline and breaks it down to mini-pipelines, which can perform coarse-grained processing (like process an MPLS label to completion). These mini-pipelines are then parallelized and used to construct a folded pipeline architecture, which augments the traditional approach by significantly reducing power consumption, a key problem in future routers. The paper compares the two approaches, discusses their advantages and disadvantages and demonstrates by quantitative measures that the folded pipeline architecture is the better solution for 100 Gbit/s processing.