Forwarding is a mechanism found in many network operations. Although a regular workstation is able to perform forwarding operations it still suffers from poor performances when compared to dedicated hardware machines. In this paper we study the possibility of using Network Processors (NPs) to improve the capability of regular workstations to forward data. We present a simple model and an experimental study demonstrating that even though NPs are less powerful than Host Processors (HPs) they can forward data more efficiently than HPs in some specific cases
