Network Processor Software Platform Key Technologies

Nowadays with the rapid development of network scale and performance, Internet branch network capacity is increasing, new service is appearing one after another. Fast and intelligent network equipment is indeed needed. So network processor (NP) is just the effective unification solution, which is suitable for each network-processing layer and has the ASIC high speed processing performance and the programmable characteristic. It both can guarantee the system flexibility, and complete the high performance hardware function which the line fast processing data packet requests. At present the network processor development environment is mainly provided by NP production merchant, data plane running on the data packet processor only provides micro code support, which only aims at the specific hardware system structure and hard to transplant. This has greatly restricted the flexibility of network processor program. The software question has become the barrier of network processor widespread and also hindered its latent superiority.The work in this thesis is part of National High-Tech Research and Development Program entitled "Key technology new operating system for network processor". According to this unbalance of NP software, this paper attempts to make up this insufficiency. Main work and the research results includes:1, The network processor hardware system structure has been abstracted and the high level-programming model has been definited.2,Language NPC has been proposed based on high-level programming model. This description language is C language subset based on the network processor development model. It has simplified network processor development and enhanced the network processor development to the higher language category.3, NPPlatform system structure and the function composition has been designed, and high level programming model and development environment - NPWare which NPPlatform includes has been realized. This platform effectively supports the multilevel coordination development characteristic of NP application system. NPWare shield the bottom hardware detail, which enhances the reutilization, and transplant ability.This research in this paper is only a preliminary study. It is a long way to establish a truly complete and formidable software platform. In the paper some next step research aspect of software platform and the link dispatch algorithm has been prospected.