August 2007
Intermediate to advanced
1008 pages
21h 13m
English
Elizabeth Seamans Juniper Networks
Thomas Alexander Polytime
The Internet, with its constantly improving data communications infrastructure, moves vast amounts of data every second. To process data at a low latency and high throughput, networking equipment vendors use dedicated hardware. At the 4 Gb/s to 40 Gb/s level, processing is done using expensive, purpose-built application-specific integrated circuits. From the 100 Mb/s to 4 Gb/s level, processing is usually performed using a combination of general-purpose CPUs, network processors, and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Processing throughput below 100 Mb/s is performed using either an x86 CPU or an embedded processor.