A New High-speed Packet Parsing Architecture

With the increasing number of new protocols and the rapid growth of the network link rate, the packet parsing architecture has been greatly challenged on its flexibility and rate. While combining the idea of pipeline design and binary-trie, a new parsing architecture is proposed in this paper, namely Parsing Pipeline Architecture for Forwarding (PPAF). It flexibly analysis packet protocol by constructing Forwarding Protocol-trie, improved the processing rate by employing hardware pipeline look-up table, and solved the unbalance of node mapping storage resource by using the node to pipeline mapping algorithm. The simulation results through the NetFPGA platform suggest that PPAF is superior than the extant high speed parsing architecture in two ways: PPAF achieves ambidexterity in processing speed and resource consumption; and it can provide independent interface-based flexible protocol parsing capabilities.