Branch Prediction For Network Processors

Originally designed to favour flexibility over packet processing performance, the future of the programmable network processor is challenged by the need to meet both increasing line rate as well as providing additional processing capabilities. To meet these requirements, trends within networking research has tended to focus on techniques such as offloading computation intensive tasks to dedicated hardware logic or through increased parallelism. While parallelism retains flexibility, challenges such as load-balancing limit its scope. On the other hand, hardware offloading allows complex algorithms to be implemented at high speed but sacrifice flexibility. To this end, the work in this thesis is focused on a more fundamental aspect of a network processor, the data-plane processing engine. Performing both system modelling and analysis of packet processing functions; the goal of this thesis is to identify and extract salient information regarding the performance of multi-processor workloads. Following on from a traditional software based analysis of programme workloads, we develop a method of modelling and analysing hardware accelerators when applied to network processors. Using this quantitative information, this thesis proposes an architecture which allows deeply pipelined micro-architectures to be implemented on the data-plane while reducing the branch penalty associated with these architectures

Optimizing energy-efficiency for multi-core packet processing systems in a compiler framework

Network applications become increasingly computation-intensive and the amount of traffic soars unprecedentedly nowadays. Multi-core and multi-threaded techniques are thus widely employed in packet processing system to meet the changing requirement. However, the processing power cannot be fully utilized without a suitable programming environment. The compilation procedure is decisive for the quality of the code. It can largely determine the overall system performance in terms of packet throughput, individual packet latency, core utilization and energy efficiency. The thesis investigated compilation issues in networking domain first, particularly on energy consumption. And as a cornerstone for any compiler optimizations, a code analysis module for collecting program dependency is presented and incorporated into a compiler framework. With that dependency information, a strategy based on graph bi-partitioning and mapping is proposed to search for an optimal configuration in a parallel-pipeline fashion. The energy-aware extension is specifically effective in enhancing the energy-efficiency of the whole system. Finally, a generic evaluation framework for simulating the performance and energy consumption of a packet processing system is given. It accepts flexible architectural configuration and is capable of performingarbitrary code mapping. The simulation time is extremely short compared to full-fledged simulators. A set of our optimization results is gathered using the framework

Hardware acceleration for power efficient deep packet inspection

The rapid growth of the Internet leads to a massive spread of malicious attacks like viruses and malwares, making the safety of online activity a major concern. The use of Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) is an effective method to safeguard the Internet. One key procedure in NIDS is Deep Packet Inspection (DPI). DPI can examine the contents of a packet and take actions on the packets based on predefined rules. In this thesis, DPI is mainly discussed in the context of security applications. However, DPI can also be used for bandwidth management and network surveillance. DPI inspects the whole packet payload, and due to this and the complexity of the inspection rules, DPI algorithms consume significant amounts of resources including time, memory and energy. The aim of this thesis is to design hardware accelerated methods for memory and energy efficient high-speed DPI. The patterns in packet payloads, especially complex patterns, can be efficiently represented by regular expressions, which can be translated by the use of Deterministic Finite Automata (DFA). DFA algorithms are fast but consume very large amounts of memory with certain kinds of regular expressions. In this thesis, memory efficient algorithms are proposed based on the transition compressions of the DFAs. In this work, Bloom filters are used to implement DPI on an FPGA for hardware acceleration with the design of a parallel architecture. Furthermore, devoted at a balance of power and performance, an energy efficient adaptive Bloom filter is designed with the capability of adjusting the number of active hash functions according to current workload. In addition, a method is given for implementation on both two-stage and multi-stage platforms. Nevertheless, false positive rates still prevents the Bloom filter from extensive utilization; a cache-based counting Bloom filter is presented in this work to get rid of the false positives for fast and precise matching. Finally, in future work, in order to estimate the effect of power savings, models will be built for routers and DPI, which will also analyze the latency impact of dynamic frequency adaption to current traffic. Besides, a low power DPI system will be designed with a single or multiple DPI engines. Results and evaluation of the low power DPI model and system will be produced in future

An Introduction to Computer Networks

An open textbook for undergraduate and graduate courses on computer networks