Real-time pre-processing system with hardware accelerator for mobile core networks

Abstract

With the rapidly increasing number of mobile devices being used as essential terminals or platforms for communication, security threats now target the whole telecommunication infrastructure and become increasingly serious. Network probing tools, which are deployed as a bypass device at a mobile core network gateway, can collect and analyze all the traffic for security detection. However, due to the ever-increasing link speed, it is of vital importance to offload the processing pressure of the detection system. In this paper, we design and evaluate a real-time pre-processing system, which includes a hardware accelerator and a multi-core processor. The implemented prototype can quickly restore each encapsulated packet and effectively distribute traffic to multiple back-end detection systems. We demonstrate the prototype in a well-deployed network environment with large volumes of real data. Experimental results show that our system can achieve at least 18 Gb/s with no packet loss with all kinds of communication protocols.