ReClick - A Modular Dataplane Design Framework for FPGA-Based Network Virtualization

Network virtualization has emerged as a powerful technique to deploy novel services and experimental protocols over shared network infrastructures. Although recent research has highlighted field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) as attractive platforms for high performance network virtualization, these devices remain inaccessible to the larger networking research community due to the absence of userfriendly programming models. A programming model that ract the intricacies of the hardware platform while being aware of the underlying resource constraints is highly desirable. In this paper, we present ReClick, a framework to efficiently design and deploy reconfigurable dataplanes for FPGA-based network virtualization systems. A hardwareagnostic programming model is described that allows developers to focus on the virtual dataplane semantics rather than the implementation details. The framework exposes interfaces similar to the popular software router development framework, Click, and pr...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: ANCS
• Authors: Deepak Unnikrishnan, Justin Lu, Lixin Gao, Russell Tessier
• Keywords: ANCS 2011, Computer Communication Networks, Computer Networks, Network Infrastructures, Networking Research Community