Design on the Elastic Protocol Customizable Data Plane and Its Mapping Algorithm

Along with the growing expansion of network functions and continuous emerging of new protocols, the novel packet types and processing requirements are established in these protocols. The Software Defined Networking (SDN) makes the network innovation simpler based on the programmable flow table. However, it is still difficult for the SDN to support the arbitrary protocol processing. This paper takes into account the parsing and lookup procedure together, and proposes a hardware structure that could support elastic customization of the arbitrary protocols. By transforming the protocol processing procedure into a multi branched tree, users can arbitrarily define their own parsing and lookup processing, which is mapped into a hardware pipeline. The prototype on FPGA platform shows its flexibility in customizing protocols. The packet processing speed can achieve 390Gbps in hardware and the hardware resource utilization is significantly reduced compared to the existing scheme. The proposed architecture is quite meaningful for the data plane design of the SDN.