Specifications

Page 12 /148
2. THE JUNIPER NETWORKS INTERNET BACKBONE ROUTER PLATFORMS
2.1 The M20, M40 and M160 Internet Core Backbone Routers
The Juniper Networks’ M20
TM
, M40
TM
and M160
TM
Internet Core Backbone
Routers are designed to provide wire-speed forwarding rates across multiple
optical interfaces for all packet sizes. The M20 and M40 are intended to fill
multiple roles in large enterprises, ISP and carrier super-POPs, playing the role of
high speed access, aggregation, cross-connect, and core backbone device. To
do so, the M20
TM
, M40
TM
and M160
TM
have both best-of-class port density for
concentrating access devices, and backbone capacity for very high-speed
Internet cores. The forwarding engine includes Internet scale routing
implementations built by acknowledged experts in these protocols.
The M20
TM
, M40
TM
and M160
TM
architecture consists of a routing engine (RE), a
packet-forwarding engine (PFE), and various I/O cards. The RE maintains the
routing table and routing code, including SNMP functionality. The PFE is
dedicated solely to the forwarding of packets in the fastest way possible. This
separation ensures that high levels of route instability do not impact the
performance of the PFE and likewise, extremely high volumes of traffic do not
impact the ability of the RE to maintain peer relationships and calculate routing
tables.
A key distinction of the PFE hardware is the development of several customized
ASICs that form a complete system of buffer management, switching, route
lookup, and encapsulation. The design provides maximum stability in extraneous
operating conditions, while at the same time providing a much lower part count,
power consumption, and higher MTBF than conventional router or switch
designs.
The M160 Internet Backbone Router
The M160 is Juniper Network’s evolution platform to provide higher density
STM-16 solutions and STM-64 based core networks. The M160 offers 4
times the capacity (160Gbps) and throughput of the M40.
The main features are as follows:
§ Continued use of JUNOS software, with proven features and reliability
for real Internet traffic.
§ Continuation of wirespeed philosophy, line rate forwarding regardless of
packet size
§ Increased STM-16 port densities, 32 per chassis, 64 per 7’ rack.
§ Support for OC192c cards, 8 per chassis.
§ Support for STM-4 & STM-1 POS/ ATM, Gigabit Ethernet.
§ Redundancy of power, routing engine, switch fabric module, system
clock module with automatic failover.
§ Chassis is just 35” high, i.e. half a rack, with 8 FPC/ 32 PIC slots.
Note - The drive to connect to OC192c trunks will depend very much on the
implementation of STM-64 capable WDMs in the transport layer.
The lowest port speed will be STM-1. It will be possible to re-utilize STM-4 &
STM-1 POS/ ATM and Gigabit PICs from M40 in the M160. The STM-16 and
STM-64 cards for the M160 are new implementations, for example, the new
STM-16 card takes up only one PIC slot in the M160.
Target Market
The M160 Internet Router is targeted at the largest Service Providers
needing increased OC-48 density over the M40 and a product path to OC-
192.