Creating Advanced Functions on Network Processors: Experience and Perspectives

Abstract

In this paper, we present five case studies of advanced networking functions and how a network processor (NP) can provide high-performance and flexible support for each of them. We first review the basic NP system architectures, and describe in more detail the IBM PowerNP architecture from a data plane as well as from a control plane point of view. We introduce models for the programmer's views of NPs that facilitate a global understanding of NP software programming. Then, for each case study, we present results from prototypes as well as general considerations that also apply to a wider range of system architectures. Namely, we investigate the suitability of NPs for

• quality-of-service (active queue management and traffic engineering),
• header processing (GPRS tunneling protocol),
• intelligent forwarding (load-balancing without flow disruption),
• payload processing (active networks code interpretation and just-in-time compilation), and
• protocol stack termination (SCTP).

Documents

• PDF (17 pages, 1004 kBytes)
• IBM Research Report Version
• Part of the TERP project

BibTeX entry

@TechReport{haas02creating-techreport,
  Author =       {Robert Haas and Clark Jeffries and Lukas Kencl and
                  Andreas Kind and Bernard Metzler and Roman Pletka and
                  Marcel Waldvogel and Laurent {Frel\'{e}choux} and
                  Patrick Droz},
  Title =        {Creating Advanced Functions on Network Processors:
                  Experience and Perspectives},
  Institution =  {IBM},
  Type =         {Research Report},
  Number =       {RZ--3460},
  Year =         2002,
  Month =        nov
}