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Carrying out network monitoring tasks remains a continuous challenge, partially because the line rate reaches and exceeds 100 Gbit/s. Besides the increasing data rate, the advent of programmable networks necessitates efficient solutions for supporting packet processing tasks in an adaptive way. Introducing a modification of a protocol or any new protocol in such a flexible infrastructure implies a novel management approach incorporating network monitoring equipment with reconfigurable architecture. The requirement for high throughput and high level of reconfiguration together put Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology into the focus of high performance networking.In this paper, we introduce a programmable, multi-purpose network platform called C-GEP that is based on a reconfigurable architecture. The system consists of two main building blocks: a high performance FPGA-based custom hardware platform and a firmware dedicated for network monitoring. We present the architecture focusing on the system-level integration of specific packet processors. The integration of processing building blocks into one high performance system has great challenges. These are primarily related to specific, limiting factors of system resources -which we discuss also in this paper.

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The increasing number of Voice over LTE deployments and IP-based voice services raise the demand for their user-centric service quality monitoring. This domain’s leading challenge is measuring user experience quality reliably without performing subjective assessments or applying the standard full-reference objective models. While the former is time- and resource-consuming and primarily executed ad-hoc, the latter depends upon a reference source and processes the voice payload that may offend user privacy. This paper presents a packet-level measurement method (introducing a novel metric set) to objectively assess network and service quality online. It is accomplished without inspecting the voice payload and needing the reference voice sample. The proposal has three contributions: (i) our method focuses on the timeliness of the media traffic. It introduces new performance metrics that describe and measure the service’s time-domain behavior from the voice application viewpoint. (ii) Based on the proposed metrics, we also present a no-reference Quality of Experience (QoE) estimation model. (iii) Additionally, we propose a new method to identify the pace of the speech (slow or dynamic) as long as voice activity detection (VAD) is present between the endpoints. This identification supports the introduced quality model to estimate the perceived quality with higher accuracy. The performance of the proposed model is validated against a full-reference voice quality estimation model called AQuA, using real VoIP traffic (originated in assorted voice samples) in controlled transmission scenarios.

Network packet parsing and packet forwarding are general tasks for all routing devices. However, the requirement for line-rate packet processing, independently from the transmission technology, is a common demand against core network equipments. In this paper, we investigate programmable hardware architectures (i.e., Field Programmable Gate Array -FPGA) as central building blocks of the data plane for state-of-the-art 100 Gbit/s network devices. We reveal the benefits and drawbacks of the available hardware architectures (such as Network Processors, Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC) and FPGAs, respectively). After showing the general packet processing steps on programmable hardware, we describe the problem space of line-rate packet processing in relation to the evolution of transmission technologies, i.e., 1, 10, 100 Gbit/s Ethernet and beyond. Moreover, we present design trade-offs, such as operational frequency, data path width and resource requirement, covering the 1 to 400 Gbit/s throughput range and we propose best practices for their hardware designs.