Research Of Parallel Processing Technology In Network Processor

Network processors are the key devices to forward packets in the routers. As there is inherent parallelism in the packets processing, network processors adopt many parallel technologies to accelerate the processing of the packets. The parallel architectures of the network processors are explored in this article and the parallel technologies adopted by the network processors are divided into three aspects. They are the parallelism inside the PEs(Processing Element), the parallelism between the PEs and the parallelism between PEs and coprocessors. The factors that limit the performance of parallelism include the policy of accessing the sharing resource ,packet processing and the packet reordering.Parallel processing is an important approach to improve performance of Internet routers, but routers with parallel architecture could cause packet reordering. Now there is an opposite viewpoint on whether routers should retain packet order or not. In this paper after a research on the out of order packets' influence on networks, we point out that when the network traffic is light, we should preserve packet order; when the traffic is heavey we could give priority to the load-balance. Then this paper presents a new way called TCP Friendly paralleled architecture to keep the capability of paralleling and the order of packet.This paper also introduced a new scheme that implements the prototype of network processor based on SOPC(System On Programmable Chip). With this scheme we could verify the pivotal technologies of network processor design.