On the use of compressed DFAs for packet classification

The process of categorizing packets into flows in an Internet router is called packet classification. All packets belonging to the same flow obey a predefined rule and are processed in a similar manner by the router itself. For example, all packets with the same destination IP address and protocol may be defined as a flow. Packet classification is the foundation of many Internet functions such as Quality of Service enforcement, monitoring applications, security, and so on. This paper presents a novel classification scheme designed for NetFPGA boards which takes advantage of a very compressed version of Deterministic Finite Automata (DFA) in order to process packets at line rate.