Abstract

Charlotte's Web Networks commissioned The Tolly Group to evaluate its Aranea-1 Core Router, a terabit router designed for use in Internet service provider networks. Tolly Group engineers conducted a battery of tests ranging from baseline IP forwarding and latency measurements, extending to examination of the Aranea-1's Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) capabilities, to support for IP Class-of-Service.

Charlotte’s Web Networks positioned the Aranea-1 as a carrier-class core router built for high-throughput IP and MPLS forwarding, large routing tables, and differentiated services in ISP backbones. In Tolly Group testing, the platform was evaluated across baseline forwarding, latency, BGP scale, MPLS label-switched path capacity, packet filtering, route-flap behavior, and IP Class-of-Service. The report presents the Aranea-1 as a terabit-class architecture intended to support both packet- and cell-based traffic while maintaining low latency under demanding core-network conditions.  

For baseline IP forwarding, the Aranea-1 delivered 99.8% of OC-48 line rate for 40-byte IP packets with zero loss and an average latency of 19.97 microseconds. When traffic was changed to an Internet-mix profile, the router forwarded at line rate with no packet loss, with average latency rising to 41.17 microseconds. MPLS performance was similarly strong: the router forwarded 99.8% of line rate for 40-byte MPLS packets with zero loss and 21.08 microseconds of average latency, and reached 99.9% of line rate with Internet-mix MPLS traffic at 41.3 microseconds average latency. Testing also found that mixed-length longest-prefix route lookups did not affect forwarding performance or latency.  

Control-plane and scale results were also notable. The Aranea-1 stored and forwarded a BGP table containing 1,480,160 unique routes, far beyond the roughly 100,000 routes typical of Internet tables at the time. In MPLS scaling, the system supported an aggregate of 18,375 label-switched paths across the six interfaces tested. Under route-flapping conditions, stable paths were affected only slightly, and flapped routes resumed full forwarding when the withdrawn 50,000 routes were re-advertised. During BGP peer formation under 90% line-rate load, packets resumed forwarding within 0.5 seconds and reached peak forwarding within 67 seconds.  

The report also highlights service differentiation. With Gold, Silver, and Bronze traffic classes configured at a weighted ratio of 70:20:5, the Aranea-1 guaranteed full delivery for Gold traffic while keeping Silver and Bronze close to target ratios under induced congestion. Combined with packet filtering that did not increase latency, these results position the Aranea-1 as a high-capacity core router designed for scalable routing, MPLS transport, and revenue-generating class-based service offerings.  

The company was a subsidiary of MRV Communications and ceased operations as a standalone company in the mid-2000s.