Research And Design Of Packet Classification System Based On Network Processor

Since the emergence of Intemet, it has kept on developing at an exponentially increasing rate, which currently enables the gigabit or higher transfer speed in the communication networks. However, the traditional router, which offers a Best-of-Service and forwards packets undistinguishedly can't meet the requirement of customized services. And inorder to provide differentiated services for various users, routers should classify packets it receives before forwardlng.Therefore, packet classification has become the foundation of differentiated services such as firewall packet filtering, policy-based routing and so on. However, it has turned out to be a bottleneck of high-speed router, and brings forward the problem of efficient classification with an acceptable time and space complexiy.This paper research and designs an system of packet classification applying the enhanced HiCuts classifying algorithm. The major work include:1. Analyzing the statistic status of the rule set, a enhanced algorithm is presented based on the HiCuts algorithm.The new algorithm add the dimension of the cuttings from 1 to 2, and reduce the numbers of child nodes by effective space aggregation method. The new algorithm has a lower space complexity in comparison to HiCuts algorithm, and the search time is much shorter, while it is more practical being carried out on network processor.2. Applying the new algorithm, a high speed packet classification system is presented based on IXP2400.After analyzing the hardware architecture of IXP2400, we design the software architecture and hardware architecture of an packet classification system under the Intel DCA frame, also giving the detailed design of function blocks. And it also makes a reasonable assignment among the microengines and memory.3. According to the memory access delay caused by the implement of the HiCuts algorithm, an optimization is presented.After copress the memory and effectively take the advantage of the IXP2400 task assigne method we make significant improvements of the packet classification algorithm,and achieve good results.