A Low Power, Programmable Networking Platform and Development Environment - Advances in Network-Embedded Management and Applications - page 21

cases are switching, routing devices, NAT devices, firewalls, deep packet
inspectors, and traffic loopback devices.
The system has been designed and developed by applying a close
hardware-software co-design methodology. This primarily defined the
distribution of tasks among the various types of processors. Beside, this
flexibility allowed the clarification of basic processing modules and
algorithms, which enabled to create a programmable networking platform.
For design space exploration and to validate the design, a SystemC [1]
based modeling environment is used. The results of the SystemC modeling
can be used to construct the final hardware models and the corresponding
software. The SystemC hardware components are also available in generic
hardware description language (Verilog/VHDL) making the synthesis of the
hardware possible. The developers will also be able to generate the top-level
hardware model through the GUI. The modules required for the generic
networking applications have been selected by identifying the most important
use cases.
After the literature survey in the next chapter, we briefly describe the
hardware, the firmware, and the development environment to be used for
various networking applications hosted by the platform. Afterwards we
highlight the usability of the environment through two use-cases: a network
monitoring DPI scenario and a routing/switching scenario.

2 Related Work

In the literature, we have found similar work dealing with packet
processing on FPGA-based systems.
Besides the industry leading Endace DAG packet capture products [3], the
NetFPGA [4] platforms are largely in use in academic research to test for
ideas and implement them on flexible hardware. The TenGig NetFPGA card
is currently under development, and it will be capable of 10G traffic handling.
It will provide 4 XFP ports RLDRAM II, QDRII, SRAM, PCIe 8x interface
and extension connector, powered by a large Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA,
XC5VTX240T which is quite expensive. A similar platform is developed
within the Cesnet Liberouter project [5], which already provides a 10G
extension card to their extensible Combo system, making it capable of 10G
packet processing. We would also mention an interesting application of
FPGA-based design platforms for Gigabit Ethernet Applications. FPGA-based
implementations offer the possibility of changing the functionality of the
platform to perform different tasks and high packet-processing rate
capabilities. In particular, the authors of [6] proposed a versatile FPGA-based
hardware platform for Gigabit Ethernet applications. By introducing
controlled degradation to the network traffic, the authors provided an in-depth