An efficient application-specific instruction-set processor for packet classification

Packet classification plays a crucial role for a number of network services such as policy-based routing, firewalls and traffic billing, just to name a few. However, classification can be a bottleneck in the above mentioned applications if not implemented properly and efficiently. In this paper we propose an Application Specific Instruction Processor (ASIP) implementation for the PCIU (Packet Classification with an Incremental Update) algorithm. The proposed ASIP design is verified and tested using the ClassBench. Results obtained indicate that the ASIP implementation achieves on average 4× speed-up in terms of preprocessing and 21× speed-up in terms of classification over a state-of-the-art Xeon processor.