Boosting the Performance of PC-based Software Routers with FPGA-enhanced Network Interface Cards

A. BIANCO, R. BIRKE, G. BOTTO, M. CHIABERGE, J.M. FINOCHIETTO, G. GALANTE, M.MELLIA, F. NERI, M. PETRACCA

Poznan, Polonia

Conferencia; IEEE Workshop on High Performance Switching and Routing (HPSR 2005); 2006

The research community is devoting increasingattention to software routers based on off-the-shelf hardwareand open-source operating systems running on the personalcomputer(PC) architecture. Today’s high-end PCs are equippedwith peripheral component interconnect (PCI) shared busesenabling them to easily fit into the multi-gigabit-per-secondrouting segment, for a price much lower than that of commercialrouters. However, commercially-available PC network interfacecards (NICs) lack programmability, and require not only packetsto cross the PCI bus twice, but also to be processed in software bythe operating system, strongly reducing the achievable forwardingrate. It is therefore interesting to explore the performanceof customizable NICs based on field-programmable gate array(FPGA) logic devices we developed and assess how well they canovercome the limitations of today’s commercially-available NICs.