Design And Implementation Of The Data Plane Software For A Multi-network Gateway Based On NP

As one of the most commonly used network equipments, the gateway is the"networking backbone"to interconnect various kinds of networks together. It connects different networks and processes a great deal of data traversing these networks. The gateway performance is directly related to the network's quality of service (QoS). The traditional gateways are mostly based on the Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC). But this solution brings a good performance at the cost of loss in flexibility. One of the most important requirements for network equipment is that itself should meet the requirements suitable for the new protocols and new services. Therefore, design a gateway with network processor which could bring flexibility to traditional gateway appears particularly important.Based on the project named"Research on the key technologies of multi-net gateway", this dissertation discusses the hardware implementation principle and the software implementation framework of the multi-net gateway. With the comparative analysis of several hardware platforms, the author studies a data plane software implementation framework of the multi-net gateway based on the network processor IXP2350, because of network processor's advantages on flexibility and high performance. This software framework could perform several functions, such as IPv4 unicast/multicast forwarding, flow statistics and control, congestion avoidance, multiple layer protocol conversion of different networks and so on.The detailed study is on the hardware architecture of IXP2350 and the Intel Internet Exchange Architecture (IXA) Portability Framework. This dissertation explores the software development model on Intel network processor with the design and implementation of a packet forwarder system. The efforts made in this dissertation provide a technical foundation for developing network processor data plane software in the near future.