Better by a HAIR: Hardware-Amenable Internet Routing

—Routing protocols are implemented in the form of software running on a general-purpose microprocessor. However, conventional software-based router architectures face significant scaling challenges in the presence of ever-increasing routing table growth and churn. Recent advances in programmable hardware and high-level hardware description languages provide the opportunity to implement BGP directly at the hardware layer. Hardware-based implementation allows designs to take advantage of the parallelization and customizability of the underlying hardware to improve performance. As a first step in this direction, we design and implement a hardware-based BGP architecture. To understand the challenges in doing this, we propose an architecture and logical design for the core components of BGP running as a logical circuit in an FPGA. We then enumerate sources of complexity and performance bottlenecks, and derive modifications to BGP that reduce complexity of hardware offloading. Our resu...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ICNP
• Authors: Firat Kiyak, Brent Mochizuki, Eric Keller, Matthew Caesar
• Keywords: Ever-increasing Routing Table, Hardware, Hardware-based Bgp Architecture, ICNP 2009, Network Protocols