Cisco ASR 1000 Series Routers are placed at the WAN edge of your enterprise data center or large office, as well as in service provider points of presence (POPs). The routers rely on the power of the ESPs to aggregate multiple traffic flows and network services, including encryption and traffic management, and forward them across WAN connections at line speeds. With router options that run from 2.5 to 200 Gbps, the Cisco ASR Family contains many models and licensing options to meet the speed and budget requirements of different types of organizations and various-sized locations.

The Cisco ASR 1000 ESP components of these routers accelerate service delivery using parallel processing. The ESPs are based on the Cisco Flow Processor (FP) for next-generation forwarding and queuing in silicon. They operate at 20-, 40-, 100-, and 200-Gbps data-plane forwarding throughput rates. Together, the Cisco ASR 1001-X, ASR 1001-HX, ASR 1002-HX, and ASR 1002-X Routers and 100- and 200-Gbps ESPs introduce the second generation of the Cisco FP hardware and software architecture. With FP-based ESPs at their core, ASR 1000 Routers accomplish the following:

• Handle all baseline packet routing operations, including MAC address classification, Layer 2 and Layer 3 forwarding, QoS classification, and NetFlow packet accounting
• Perform advanced services such as IP Security (IPsec) encryption, Network Address Translation (NAT), firewall, AppNav, Cisco Application Visibility and Control (AVC), Performance Routing (PfR), and Locator ID Separation Protocol (LISP); they offer diverse feature Layer 2 connectivity options such as Ethernet over MPLS (EoMPLS), Virtual Private LAN Services (VPLS), Overlay Transport Virtualization (OTV), and Virtual Extensible LAN Services (VXLAN)