Events Calendar

Ph.D. Defense: Weirong Jiang, High Performance Packet Forwarding on Parallel Architectures

"High Performance Packet Forwarding on Parallel Architectures"Thesis Abstract:
Packet forwarding has long been a performance bottleneck in Internet infrastructure including routers and switches. While the throughput requirements continue to grow, power dissipation has emerged as an additional critical concern. Also, as the Internet constantly evolves, packet forwarding engines need to be flexible to enable future innovations. Although ternary content addressable memories (TCAMs) have been widely used for packet forwarding, they have high power consumption and are inflexible for adapting to new addressing and
routing protocols.This thesis studies the use of low-power memory technology such as static random access memory (SRAM)
combined with field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to develop high-throughput, power-efficient and
flexible solutions for various packet forwarding problems including IP lookup, packet classification and flexible flow matching.We propose an algorithm-architecture co-design framework to map state-of-the-art packet forwarding
algorithms onto SRAM-based parallel architectures. Several challenges for such mapping are addressed. High
throughput is achieved via pipelining or multi-processing. Meanwhile, enabled by the architecture design, the algorithms are optimized to reduce the memory requirements to fit large forwarding tables in the on-chip memory. In addition to the power reduction achieved by replacing TCAMs with SRAMs, we propose
architecture- and data structure -level optimizations to further lower the power consumption. We prototype our solutions on FPGA and demonstrate that they outperform the state-of-the-art with respect to throughput, memory requirement and power consumption.Defense Committee:
Murali Annavaram
Ramesh Govindan
Viktor K. Prasanna (Chair)

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - -248

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Janice Thompson