A Packet Generator on the NetFPGA Platform

A packet generator and network traffic capture system has been implemented on the NetFPGA. The NetFPGA is an open networking platform accelerator that enables rapid development of hardware-accelerated packet processing applications. The packet generator application allows Internet packets to be transmitted at line rate on up to four gigabit Ethernet ports simultaneously. Data transmitted is specified in a standard PCAP file, transferred to local memory on the NetFPGA card, then sent on the gigabit links using a precise data rate, inter-packet delay, and number of iterations specified by the user. The hardware circuit also simultaneously operates as a packet capture system, allowing traffic to be captured from up to all four of the gigabit Ethernet ports. Timestamps are recorded and traffic can be transferred back to the host and stored using the same PCAP format. The project has been implemented as a fully open-source project and serves as an exemplar project on how to build and distribute NetFPGA applications. All of the code (Verilog hardware, system software, verification scripts, make files, and support tools) can be freely downloaded from the NetFPGA.org Website. Benchmarks comparing this hardware-accelerated application to the fastest available PC with a PCIe NIC shows that the FPGA-based hardware-accelerator far exceeds the performance possible using TCP-reply software.