A Programmable Stream Processing Engine for Packet Manipulation in Network Processors

In this paper the authors introduce a programmable stream processing engine working as a coprocessor in a network processor egress path. By using a special pipelining architecture several generic manipulations can be performed on-the-fly on a packet data stream with line-speed. In two measurement scenarios for IP forwarding and IP tunneling the authors demonstrate the benefits of the post-processor concept compared to a pure software reference implementation.