'Net pioneer Roberts touts 'Fast Flow Routing'

A start-up led by one of the “fathers” of the Internet debuted this week along with the company's first product.

Anagran, founded by Larry Roberts, one of the designers and developers of the ARPANET computer packet network that evolved into the Internet, announced the immediate availability of the Anagran FR-1000 Flow Router. The one-rack unit FR-1000 is designed to improve the performance of IP-based video, voice, data and wireless applications with lower cost and energy consumption than today’s Layer 3 routers.

With IP service providers now offering cable- and HDTV-quality IPTV, and enterprises looking into video-based virtual meetings, video distribution represents the Internet's future, Anagran contends. Large fixed-rate flows, such as video, are not supported well with current routers, which have freeze-frame, jitter and general scalability challenges under moderate levels of network congestion.

Traditional routers process individual packets independently, with no knowledge of the current state or behavior of the flow those packets belong to, which is vital in determining the overall quality of application delivery, Anagran contends. The result is that important packets can be randomly dropped or substantially delayed.

“Routers are doing the best they can do if they don’t know the rate of the flow,” Roberts says. “Since they don’t know how it flows, they can’t know any rates. When you have a swarm of bees coming at you, all you can do is knock some of them down.”

Roberts says the price of memory has decreased to the point where it is now possible to maintain flow state at the input port rather than trying to control flows at the output queue. The Anagran product is the result of seven years of work at Caspian Networks, Roberts’ former core router start-up, and Anagran.

The FR-1000 resides at or just before the network edge and performs rate limiting on network flows, which are streams of packets associated with a particular session, be it a video download, image transfer or a voice call. The FR-1000 sports 48 Gigabit Ethernet ports and 96Gbps of capacity. It is compatible with existing IP routers from leading vendors and works with any WAN optimization or deep-packet inspection product, Anagran says.

Based on patent-pending technology, the FR-1000 watches and evaluates flows traveling through conventional IP router networks. Rather than being able to process and route only a succession of individual packets, Anagran’s Fast Flow Routing architecture looks at each packet as part of its higher-level flow and, based on specified performance and QoS priorities, routes it.

These priorities are enforced through Intelligent Flow Discard (IFD), Anagran’s approach to traffic control and congestion management that is designed to meter incoming flows by class and eliminate delay and packet loss caused by traditional routers’ large output queues under traffic overload. The FR-1000 keeps statistics on each flow in real time — the source, destination, the amount of traffic running, the duration and other metrics that define the flow.