Designing high-speed packet processing tasks at arbitrary levels of abstraction

Abstract

Packet processing systems of forthcoming high-speed network nodes demand extremely high processing rates, but also modularity and easy adaptability due to new or evolving protocols and services. As the fixed architecture and instruction set of current network processors sometimes hinders an efficient implementation of processing tasks, we introduced the MIXMAP architecture [4] that is designed to offer programmability at multiple levels of abstraction. Now we describe the prototypical realization of this architecture showing its feasibility. Our results indicate that up to 170 million packets per second can be processed with this architecture using current FPGAs. By implementing packet processing tasks at register-transfer level and at software level, we validate the architecture's applicability and the benefits of implementing at an appropriate level of abstraction.