Abstract: Continually development of the network brings about higher requests to hardware resources of network node devices including carrier Ethernet systems. Switch chips are usually important components of carrier Ethernet products and they are less expandable because that they can' t be programmed. The contents of important hardware resources such as layer 2 table,layer 3 table and access control list are unchangeable without upgrade of the hardware. However,those hardware resources can't often meet needs of applications. As to current Ethernet products, no special measure except upgrading hardware is adopted to solve the problem. On the other hand, Pareto principle indicates that only the minority of items in hardware tables plays important role in practical network and the majority of the items has less influence on network behavior. So, it is feasible to adopt a special method to manage and make full use of the hardware resources. A method was presented to solve the problem of hardware resource inadequacy. Based on the virtual memory technology of operation system, a special algorithm was used to expand the hardware resources in order to improve system forwarding performance. Software tables are set up in the system memory and the hardware tables can be thought to be caches of their corresponding software tables. The LFU algorithm is adopted to exchange data between hardware tables and software tables in order that the hardware tables always store more important items, then the performance of carrier Ethernet systcxn can be improved.The experiments show that the method can reach its expected aim.

Key words: Carrier ethernet, Virtual technology, Switch chip, Hardware resource