Publication No 36552

Author(s)

Hauger, S.*; Junghans, S.*; Köhn, M.*; Sass, D.*

Title

A Scalable Architecture for Flexible High-Speed Packet Classification

Topics

Local and Metropolitan Area Networks; Broadband Networks; Internet

Methods

Systems Engineering

Keywords

CLASSIFICATION; ARCHITECTURE; BROADBAND; HIGH SPEED; HARDWARE; IMPLEMENTATION; SYSTEM DESIGN; PROGRAMMABLE LOGIC; RECONFIGURATION; TABLE-LOOK-UP METHOD; MAN; WAN

Abstract

Inspection of a packet with respect to certain criteria and subsequent mapping of the packet to an according category is an essential task in any packet processing system. This is commonly referred to as packet classification. For such packet processing systems new or changing requirements are coming up continuously as networks and network services are rapidly evolving. So the architecture of a packet classification unit needs to be capable of processing packets at high speeds in the network nodes. Furthermore it needs to offer a high flexibility and adaptability with respect to new or changing protocol definitions and classification rules. Also, in order to meet future requirements the scalability of packet classification architectures is very important. We present an architecture for hardware-based packet classification, that is highly adaptable to new or changing protocol definitions and classification rules. The architecture is easily scalable with respect to both processing speed and the number of classification rules. Further, we describe our realization of the proposed classification architecture integrated into an FPGA based 1 Gbps high precision network measurement system. Also, we show that our architecture is applicable for line rates of at least 10 Gbps on current FPGAs. Finally, a discussion of scalability issues of the proposed architecture and performance and resource utilization measures are presented.

Year

2006

Reference entry

Hauger, S.; Junghans, S.; Köhn, M.; Sass, D.
A Scalable Architecture for Flexible High-Speed Packet Classification
Report, IKR, Universität Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany, December 2006

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