In the networking world, routers and switches deal with a sequence of random packets that need to be routed/switched to destinations dictated by their header fields after appropriate security checks and classification. Each packet requires 15-25 memory transactions to random locations before it is routed from the ingress to an egress of the router/switch.
Random transactions Rate are the # of fully random memory accesses (reads or writes) that can be performed on the memory. Simply stated it is the rate at which random data can be addressed (or random address rate).This metric is independent of the number of bits being accessed for the transaction (transaction bit width). Random transactions rate would be measured in million transactions per second or MT/s.
Memory Random Transaction Rate (RTR) is currently one of the major limiting factors for the continued increase in networking line and switching rates.
