Abstract

Tolly Group Report #202111 (February 2002) validates IBM PowerNP NP4GS3 network processor for OC-48c Packet-over-SONET forwarding.

Wire-speed throughput. In three scenarios—30,000-entry MAE-West table, 100,000-entry synthetic table and the same table with 7,300 route updates/s—the NP4GS3 forwarded traffic at full OC-48c rate across fourteen packet sizes (48–9 180 bytes) with <0.001% loss, topping 6 Mpps in both ingress and egress directions.

Concurrent route updates. Even while handling 7,300 updates/s on the 100,000-route table the processor held line-rate performance, proving ample headroom for control-plane tasks.

Low latency. Average delay measured ≈13 µs for 48-byte packets in the MAE-West test and remained low across all packet sizes; latency rose only modestly under the heavier synthetic-table workloads.

Conclusion: IBM PowerNP NP4GS3 sustains OC-48c wire-speed forwarding, million-route scale and sub-15 µs latency even during thousands of simultaneous route updates, making it a strong candidate for high-performance switch and router designs that need predictable line-rate operation under real-world routing stress.