Networking devices such as routers and switches have evolved quite a bit over the past years, both in the service provider network and in the enterprise. It is a challenge to build these devices, both from the hardware and software perspectives. It is a very competitive area, and companies are always trying to out-do each other, with the latest feature or the latest improvement to a feature, to try and win a major customer account. The field is in almost continual churn because of new protocol specifications that keep coming in from various standards organizations, and because of innovations made by networking equipment manufacturers to make their products more feature-rich, faster, more scalable and more reliable.

In my blog, I will try to talk about some of the important recent ideas and innovations in the networking area, as also some of the interesting issues that come up in architecting, designing and implementing such devices.