The Design And Implementation Of Protocol Processor Unit Control Plane Based On Network Processor

With the greatly development of network's scale and performance, multi-media business, such as sound and video, increase and a lots of new business come out. This requires network equipments with wire-speed and intelligent processing capabilities. General CPU can't meet the requirements of network processing tasks, especially in the processing performance of data receiving, processing and transmitting. So network equipment manufacturers are drove to develop network equipment based on ASIC. It increases the performance of the equipment, but could not overcome the inherent shortcomings of ASIC, such as lack of flexibility, long development cycle and so on. The emergence of the network processors with high-speed processing capabilities and fully programmable characteristics precisely meets the needs. It's a new and effective unified solution.Protocol processor unit systems based on the network processor can quickly and accurately filter the data in the network packets, and distinguish between billing packets and free packets, deal with distinction. This system takes full advantage of the network processor's powerful data packet processing capacity, and ensures high throughput wire-speed work.This article introduces what the author has done about the development of protocol processor unit system based on network processor during graduate student period. It can be divided into two parts. The first part is the theoretic of network processor architecture, function features and application. The second part details the development of protocol processor unit system, which focuses on the design and implementation of control plane. The structure of the article is as below.Chapter 1 gives brief introduction of Network Processor related knowledge, Intel network processor hardware, software architecture and software development environment.Chapter 2 introduces protocol processor unit positioning, function, application, the general design and data plane design.Chapter 3 details the design and implementation of control plane in protocol processor unit.Chapter 4 describes the test, test results analysis and experience gains during test.