Research And Implementation Of Networked FPGA Control Mechanisms

After decades of development, needs, services and form of networks has undergone tremendous changes. The Internet has entered the e ra of rapid innovation. The development of Network technology is inseparable from the network devices. Compared with that network devices based on general purpose processors, network processors and ASIC, FPGA not only has strongly reconfigurable capability, but also has a good compromise of performance and flexibility. These features make FPGA been widely used in the current Internet which is full of increasingly complex function.At present, when the FPGA is deployed in the network, most of them will work together with smarter processors through the PCIe. This approach makes the reconfigurable data plane and control plane tightly coupled, which loss the flexibility of deployment in the network. What's more, the decentralized management model leads to a big difficulty in FPGA's managment. To solve these problems, this article proposes a new method of using FPGA in the network, namely Networked FPGA(NF). It means that FPGA is an independent network device which can flexiblely implement network functions deployed in the network. We also makes an intensive study on Networked FPGA control mechanisms, which including research on control model, management control protocols and management mechanisms. The main work and contributions include:(1) This article proposes the concept of Networked FPGA, and summarizes the concept and advantages; and abstractes the basic functions and basic hardware logic that Networked FPGA should have; introduces the working principle and process of Networked FPGA in detail; proposes the four level control model and message framework of management control protocols according to the Networked FPGA's characteristics and requirements.(2) This article designs a centralized controller model of Networked FPGA based on the four level model; introducs the design ideas, framework, working principle and process, critical buffer space design and application interface of the controller in detail; designs the management control protocol, which named NFAC(Networked FPGA Access And Control Protocol); introducs the working principle and process of NFAC in detail; presents the set of commands an command formats of NFAC; proposes the Networked FPGA's management mechanism based on the control model and NFAC; describes the discovery mechanism and configuration management mechanisms of Networked FPGA in detail.(3) Based on NetMagic platform, this article achieves a prototype system of Networked FPGA control model. we presented the implementation in hardware of Networked FPGA and the implementation in software of control mechanisms; designed and achieved two sets of experiments in order to analysis and evaluation of the performance of the controller and systems based on the prototype system. Experiments show that the proposed control mechanisms have very high availability, suitable for deployment using the network.In summary, this paper makes an intensive study on Networded FPGA control mechanisms, and proposes a set solution for deploying Networked FPGA in the network. These works have an important reference value in applying and researching FPGA in the network.