International Journal of Computer Applications |
Foundation of Computer Science (FCS), NY, USA |
Volume 89 - Number 3 |
Year of Publication: 2014 |
Authors: Shadi Atalla, andrea Bianco, Robert Birke, Luca Giraudo |
10.5120/15479-4193 |
Shadi Atalla, andrea Bianco, Robert Birke, Luca Giraudo . A Load Balancer for a Multi-Stage Router Architecture. International Journal of Computer Applications. 89, 3 ( March 2014), 1-7. DOI=10.5120/15479-4193
Multi-stage software router architectures permit to overcome several limitations inherent to single stage software routers. One of the key elements of the multi-stage architecture under study are the load balancers, which are used to distribute the load among backend routers. However, using a PC (Personal Computer) as a load balancer could create a performance bottleneck in the overall architecture. Since the operations performed by the load balancer are simple, we explore the possibility of an hardware-based implementation of load balancing functionality with the goal of improving its performance. In this paper, we describe the architecture of an FPGA-based load balancer and we present some performance results of its prototype implementation.