ENHANCED IMPLEMENTATION OF AN ACTIVE NETWORK SWITCH FOR MULTIMEDIA APPLICATIONS

Abstract

During the last two decades with increasing the users of internet and the real time applications such as. audio and video conferences, chaning, home cinema. and all multimedia applications which need a powerful network to support all this serYices. Hence conventional network with its problems form slow network evolution and cripple of conventional equipments or hardware parts to go with the grO\\ ing of number of users and their requests. This is the reason. \\ hich pushes scientists to think in new fashion ofnemork. which is able to fulfill all users requirements and over come the weakness of conventional network. Active networking is a step beyond the conventional networking technology in which the routers have the role to merely forward datagrams and update routing tables. Its primary goal is to modi!)• the S\\•itching infrastructure of the network on the tly. and more generally. to allow customized computation to be run in the network. The need for active technology• has been asserted from the contradiction of conwntional network protocols with a number of widely used applications. which need the multicast operation such as web proxies. firewalls. media gate\\•ays. and overlay networks. Also. the active technology has the tlexibility and expandability for nenvork upgrading more than the conventional network. which passed through the slow process of standardization. Then in this thesis \\e study the different designs of the multicast switch from fixed path and multi-path network. apply a new routing algorithm to enhance their speed. These designs have been implemented in the FPGA and comparison among them for using the best one in the implementation of a new architecture tor an active multicast switch. It provides the capability to execute customized code, which goes be_yond the common header processing signals in multicast switches. It can mainly be used tor building computer active networks that is recommended to saris!)• users need tor future Internet applications. The switch is implemented using Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology and Virtual Hardware Description Language (VHDL) language. This means that it can easily reprogrammed. Active switches usually reduce the O\ erhead processing time required to process software in computer networks: hence they increasingly accelerate the performance of the network. Perfonnance evaluation of the switch including throughput and max delay is achieved. Factors affecting the switch design such as time complexity and expandability are anal;.•zed. Results show that the active multicast switch is reliable and suitable tor networks that supports multimedia applications.