A flexible accelerator for Layer 7 networking applications

In this paper, we present a flexible accelerator designed for networking applications. The accelerator can be utilized efficiently by a variety of Network Processor designs. Most Network Processors employ hardware accelerators for implementing key tasks. New applications require new tasks, such as pattern matching, to be performed on the packets in real-time. Using our proposed accelerator, we have implemented several such tasks and measured their performance. Specifically, the accelerator achieves 25-fold improvement on the performance of pattern matching, and 10-fold improvement for tree lookup, over optimized software solutions. Since the accelerator is used for different tasks, the hardware requirements are small compared to an accelerator group that implements the same set of tasks. We also present accurate analytic models to estimate the execution time of these networking tasks.