Alternative Multiple Spanning Tree Protocol (AMSTP) for Optical Ethernet Backbones

The availability and affordable cost of Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches has impacted the deployment of metropolitan area networks (MAN) and campus networks. This paper presents a new protocol, the alternative multiple spanning tree protocol (AMSTP), that uses multiple source based spanning trees for backbones using Ethernet switches. It provides minimum paths and more efficient usage of optical backbone infrastructure than currently proposed protocols such as resilient packet ring and rapid spanning tree. The protocol exhibits features similar to MAC routing protocols like Link State Over MAC (LSOM) such as optimum path and effective infrastructure usage, without requiring MAC routing due to the use of the spanning tree protocol paradigm. AMSTP is not restricted to specific topologies such as ring or tree, but performs efficiently in arbitrary topologies. Among the application areas are optical backbones of campus and MANs.Publicad

Quarc: a high-efficiency network on-chip architecture

The novel Quarc NoC architecture, inspired by the Spidergon scheme is introduced as a NoC architecture that is highly efficient in performing collective communication operations including broadcast and multicast. The efficiency of the Quarc architecture is achieved through balancing the traffic which is the result of the modifications applied to the topology and the routing elements of the Spidergon NoC. This paper provides an ASIC implementation of both architectures using UMCpsilas 0.13 mum CMOS technology and demonstrates an analysis and comparison of the cost and performance between the Quarc and the Spidergon NoCs

Design of testbed and emulation tools

The research summarized was concerned with the design of testbed and emulation tools suitable to assist in projecting, with reasonable accuracy, the expected performance of highly concurrent computing systems on large, complete applications. Such testbed and emulation tools are intended for the eventual use of those exploring new concurrent system architectures and organizations, either as users or as designers of such systems. While a range of alternatives was considered, a software based set of hierarchical tools was chosen to provide maximum flexibility, to ease in moving to new computers as technology improves and to take advantage of the inherent reliability and availability of commercially available computing systems

Hierarchical Up/Down Routing Architecture for Ethernet backbones and campus networks

We describe a new layer two distributed and scalable routing architecture. It uses an automatic hierarchical node identifier assignment mechanism associated to the rapid spanning tree protocol. Enhanced up/down mechanisms are used to prohibit some turns at nodes to break cycles, instead of blocking links like the spannning tree protocol does. The protocol performance is similar or better than other turn prohibition algorithms recently proposed with lower complexity O(Nd) and better scalability. Simulations show that the fraction of prohibited turns over random networks is less than 0.2. The effect of root bridge election on the performance of the protocol is limited both in the random and regular networks studied. The use of hierarchical, tree-descriptive addresses simplifies the routing, and avoids the need of all nodes having a global knowleddge of the network topology. Routing frames through the hierarchical tree at very high speed is possible by progressive decoding of frame destination address, without routing tables or port address learning. Coexistence with standard bridges is achieved using combined devices: bridges that forward the frames having global destination MAC addresses as standard bridges and frames with local MAC frames with the proposed protocol.Publicad