A Programming Environment for Network Processors

There is growing interest in network processor technologies capable of processing packets at line rates. In this paper, we present the design, implementation and evaluation of NetBind, a programming environment for constructing data paths in network processor-based routers. NetBind balances the flexibility of network programmability against the need to process and forward packets at line speeds. To support dynamic binding of components with minimum addition of instructions in the critical path, NetBind modifies the machine language code of components at run time. To support fast data path composition, NetBind reduces the number of binding operations required for constructing data paths to a minimum set so that binding latencies are comparable to packet forwarding times. Data paths constructed using NetBind seamlessly share the resources of the same network processor. The NetBind source code described and evaluated in this paper is freely available on the Web [15] for experimentation.