Packet Processing on Stream Architecture- Emerging Network Applications

Emerging network applications are shifting from routing and traffic managementto those requiring inspection and modification of packet contents. Such applicationsact on data streams and the requirement to process every byte of a packetexceeds the already-substantial processing capabilities of high-speed networkingequipment.Network processors are application-specific processors that are optimized tobridge the gap between the performance of ASIC and the programmability ofgeneral-purpose processors. Performance on traditional network applications isimpressive but we believe that these architectures are not well-suited for theemerging packet applications.Stream architectures are specifically designed to apply a consistent set of complexoperations to each of a sequence of elements. Packet processing shares many ofthe same characteristics of media and image processing that motivate streamarchitectures: little global data reuse abundant data parallelism and high computationalcomplexity. Therefore stream architectures have been proposed as efficientand flexible platforms for network packet processing.