Quidway® NetEngine 40E Core Router System Architecture

Quidway® NetEngine 40E Core Router

System Architecture
Overview
The Quidway® NetEngine 40E-8 Core Router (“NE40E” hereinafter) is an enhanced high-end
network product of the NE series launched by Huawei. It is mainly applied in IP backbone networks,
IP MANs and the edge of other large IP networks. It can provide wire-speed 10G interfaces and can
be networked with core routers of the NE5000E and NE80E series to form an IP network solution of
integral architecture and clear hierarchy.
In addition to the powerful IP service processing capabilities of core routers, the NE40E integrates
Layer 3 (L3) Ethernet switching capabilities and provides abundant IP edge service features,
including Ethernet switching, PE, tunneling and stream queuing. It can serve as a service router of
the MAN to fully satisfy the development requirements of MAN IP and Ethernet services.
The NE40E provides a switching capacity of 640 Gbps, an interface capacity of 160Gbps and a
packet forwarding rate of 200Mpps. It may provide higher capacity in subsequent versions. It has
altogether 12 slots. Among these slots, two are for the SRU (1:1 backup), two are for the SFU
(working with two SRU boards to provide 1+3 backup for the switching network) and eight are
service slots.

System Architecture
Based on the distributed hardware forwarding and non-blocking switching technology, the NE40E
employs the industry-leading high-performance Network Processors (NPs). It provides carrier-class
reliability, wire-speed forwarding performance, complete QoS mechanism, powerful service
processing capabilities and high scalability. It pushes the IP network towards broadband, security,
service and intelligence.

Hardware architecture of the NE40E

Copyright ©2007 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved. 1

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 Quidway® NetEngine 40E Core Router System Architecture

The NE40E consists of the following major boards: Switch and Route Processing Unit (SRU),
Switch Fabric Unit (SFU), service board and abundant Line Processing Units (LPUs). Redundancy
design is adopted for the key parts such as SRUs, SFUs, fans and power supplies to raise the
reliability of the entire system. The interface types of LPUs include FE, GE, 10GE, POS, CPOS,
ATM and RPR.
The logical architecture of the NE40E includes three planes: data plane, control and management
plane, and monitoring plane. The three planes provide the following functions:

Logical architecture of the NE40E

z The data plane completes high-speed data packet processing and internal non-blocking
switching, including packet encapsulation/decapsulation, IPv4/MPLS forwarding processing,
QoS and packet scheduling, internal high speed switching and various statistics.
z The control and management plane completes system control and management functions. It is
the nerve center of the entire system. The control and management unit completes functions
such as protocol and signaling processing, system status configuration and maintenance
management as well as system status reporting and control.
z The monitoring plane independently completes system environment monitoring, including
voltage detection, system power on/off control, temperature detection and fan control to
ensure the safe and stable operation of the system. It isolates the fault in time when a unit is
faulty, thus guaranteeing the normal operation of the other system components.

Copyright ©2007 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved. 2

http://www.huawei.com/products/datacomm/