Research On Software Platform Technology For Network Processors

Network Processor (NP) is a kind of programmable ASIP designed purposely for network processing tasks. It can achieve high processing performance and at the same time can be programmed flexibly. These two features make it very suitable for highspeed networking and service evolution. Currently, there are amounts of researches around architectural issues for network processor. However, there has been little work on NP software. Just for example, although Intel IXP NP family has evolved to its third generation, Intel still launched the IXA University Plan to boost NP (especially NP software) related researches.NP software development is a very tough task due to the parallel architectural complexity of NP and the cross-plane particularity of network processing system. Currently, the deficiencies of NP software support lie in three aspects: high-level programming model and environment, network processing algorithm library, and OS support suitable to cross-plane system.The work of this thesis is just to alleviate the difficult conditions of NP software development, which is based on the project called System Software Platform for Network Processor (NPPlatform) supported by the 863 Research Plan of China and the IXA University Plan of Intel Corporation. Using Intel IXP2400 board as our experimental platform, the thesis has studied the following issues:NPPlatform, outcome of our research, is discussed with the illustration of its architectural and functional design. Also, the design and implementation of NPWare, a key component of NPPlatform, is presented. NPPlatform can support the cross-plane features of NP software development efficiently, whereas NPWare can hide many details of the underlying hardware and thus improve the reusability and portability of NP-based applications.Existing packet scheduling algorithms can not fulfill the two goals at the same time, i.e., low time complexity and good QoS guarantee. Thus, a new packet scheduler based on the concept of even service sequence is proposed and implemented on NP. The analytical and simulation results show that the scheme is very good in some important aspects such as time complexity, fairness, scheduling latency. Performance of the new scheduler is not proportional with the number of flow and thus is quite scalable. Compared with several recently proposed DRR-like algorithms such as Stratifed-RR, our new algorithm shows...