An Integrated Hardware Solution for MAC Address Translation, MPLS, and Traffic Management in Access Networks

Today, an increasing number of customers subscribes for a high bandwidth Internet access. But not only communication speed is demanded. Quality-of-service moves more and more into the customers´ focus. Both carriers and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have increasing requirements derived from new services they want to offer to their customers. We present a new hardware solution is presented, which can satisfy many of these upcoming demands. This solution is highly flexible and can be adapted to various applications. The MAC address translation - MPLS user network interface (MATMUNI) provides the functionality of MAC address translation (MAT), multi protocol label switching-user network interface (MPLS-UNI), and a traffic manager (TM). This way, a module implemented on a single FPGA offers a wide range of functionality in an access network for low costs and high flexibility. The selection of an FPGA as implementation target offers the possibility to adapt to future demands towards functionality. Moreover, the all functional elements work with wire speed. Only a negligible delay is inserted into the datapath