NetFPGA is a powerful platform for building high performance networking systems. The reconfigurable nature of the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) makes it more suitable for certain network applications. The current NetFPGA platform supports four Ethernet ports and it can be configured as a four-port Ethernet router or switch. In this paper, we describe the implementation of an 8-port Ether...

NetFPGA is a platform that allows students to build real networking hardware, using industry-standard design tools (e.g. Verilog), then deploy and debug their hardware in an operational network. In the canonical classroom design exercise, a student builds an Ethernet switch, or an Internet router and makes it interoperate with other students’ solutions. NetFPGA-v1 has been used in classes at St...

Network emulators play an important role when researchers want to evaluate the performance of newly designed protocols or network mechanisms instead of deploying them in real networks, because network emulators can provide appropriate network situations, (for example, delay, bottleneck bandwidth and packet loss) needed for experiments through easy control ‘knobs’. In this paper, we have impleme...

The NetFPGA[2] community has made significant progress in making experimentation with high-speed reconfigurable networking hardware[6] easier and more accessible. They have provided an environment in which hardware modules implemented in Verilog can work together with software running on a host CPU using the primitives of DMA packet transfer and register access over the PCI bus. The NetFPGA’s V...

The NetFPGA 2 platform is widely used by the networking research and education communities. But the current software package supports only Linux. This paper describes the development of a Windows Support Framework for the NetFPGA 2 platform. We present the Windows Support Framework design after we briefly introduce the Windows Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS). We then describe the ...

This paper describes the design and implementation of two feature extensions to the NetFPGA reference router fast reroute and multipath routing. We also share our insight into the inherent similarities of these two seemingly disparate features that enable us to run them simultaneously. Both features are designed to work at line-rate. With minimum modification of both hardware and software, the ...

The NetFPGA platform enables students and researchers to build high-performance networking systems using Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) hardware. A new version of the NetFPGA platform has been developed and is available for use by the academic community. The NetFPGA platform has modular interfaces that enable development of complex hardware designs by integration of simple building blocks...

1 It is possible to forward minimum-sized packets at rates of hundreds of Mbps using commodity hardware and Linux. We had a preference for the Click Modular Router platform due its flexibility and the fact that it claimed to have equal or higher performance than native forwarding if used with its polling drivers. Moreover, the NetFPGA is an open networking platform accelerator that enables rese...

Hardware-based packet classification and capture can be a useful feature for a high-speed networked device, or a useful debugging aid for NetFPGA projects. This paper presents the design and implementation details of a drop-in module for the NetFPGA framework which provides a simple but nevertheless highly flexible system for matching patterns in one or more packet headers and/or payloads and d...