PACKET SPRAYING FOR LOAD BALANCING ACROSS MULTIPLE PACKET PROCESSORS

• US 20100284271A1
• Filed: 07/21/2010
• Published: 11/11/2010
• Est. Priority Date: 04/12/2002
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Juniper Networks Incorporated
• Original Assignee: Juniper Networks Incorporated
• Inventors: SKIBO, Thomas M., CHEN, Chi-Chung, FERGUSON, Dennis C.
• Granted Patent: US 8,416,686 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 370/230
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 45/60 Router architectures
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 47/10 Flow control; Congestion control
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 47/125 by balancing the load, e.g. traffic engineering
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 47/522 Dynamic queue service slot or variable bandwidth allocation

Abstract

A network device includes multiple packet processing engines implemented in parallel with one another. A spraying component distributes incoming packets to the packet processing engines using a spraying technique that load balances the packet processing engines. In particular, the spraying component distributes the incoming packets based on queue lengths associated with the packet processing engines and based on a random component. In one implementation, the random component is a random selection from all the candidate processing engines. In another implementation, the random component is a weighted random selection in which the weights are inversely proportional to the queue lengths.

Claims

1. A load balancing device comprising:

a plurality of queues designated to process packets from a stream of packets; and

spray logic configured to select one of the plurality of queues to receive a packet based on a random selection function.

2-31. -31. (canceled)