A Low Power, Programmable Networking Platform and Development Environment - Advances in Network-Embedded Management and Applications - page 19

Chapter 2
A Low Power, Programmable Networking Platform and
Development Environment
Pál Varga, István Moldován, Dániel Horváth, Sándor Plósz
Budapest University of Technology and Economics
Inter-University Cooperative Research Centre for Telecommunications and
Informatics,
Magyar Tudósok krt. 2, H-1117
Budapest, Hungary
{pvarga, moldovan, horvathd, plosz}@tmit.bme.hu
Abstract. Programmable networking platforms are getting widely
used for customized traffic manipulation, analysis and network
management. This propagates the need for exceptional development
flexibility, for wide variety of high-speed interfaces and for the usage of
high performance, yet low power technologies. This paper presents an
FPGA-based programmable platform, capable of real-time processing,
filtering and manipulating 10Gbps traffic. In order to expand its
potential, besides the two 10GbE interfaces, the platform contains
extension slots for COM express, mini PCI-e, and it has 16 onboard
SFP connectors, towards which the fraction of the traffic, or even the
full traffic can be forwarded to. The design is modular, programmable
in both hardware (firmware) and software, aiming low power
consumption. The full potential of the hardware can only be exploited
with an easy-to-use development environment, with simple design
customization and support for creating new applications. To fulfill this,
a development environment is also presented, including a modeling
framework that provides an easy way to create new networking
applications on the platform. This framework allows modeling
applications in SystemC, and eases the development of the hardware
description code.
Keywords: 10GE, programmable platform, DPI, FPGA, low
power