Large-scale wire-speed packet classification on FPGAs

Multi-field packet classification is a key enabling function of a variety of network applications, such as firewall processing, Quality of Service differentiation, traffic billing, and other value added services. Although a plethora of research has been done in this area, wire-speed packet classification while supporting large rule sets remains difficult. This paper exploits the features provided by current FPGAs and proposes a decision-tree-based, two-dimensional dual-pipeline architecture for multi-field packet classification. To fit the current largest rule set in the on-chip memory of the FPGA device, we propose several optimization techniques for the stateof-the-art decision-tree-based algorithm, so that the memory requirement is almost linear with the number of rules. Specialized logic is developed to support varying number of branches at each decision tree node. A tree-to-pipeline mapping scheme is carefully designed to maximize the memory utilization. Since our architecture is...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2009
• Where: FPGA
• Authors: Weirong Jiang, Viktor K. Prasanna
• Keywords: FPGA, FPGA 2009, Multi-field Packet Classification, On-chip Memory, Packet Classification