Implementation of stateless routing mechanisms for multicast traffic on NetFPGA card

Recent researches have studied how to support the online distribution of multimedia contents efficiently, reducing almost completely the state information within switching nodes. However, many of these studies have been carried out only in a theoretical way and have been verified by simulations, without actual hardware implementations, which will reveal their true performance. One of the main proposals consists on changing the current paradigm in transport networks, by encoding the path information into packet headers using Bloom filters to virtually eliminate the routing tables. In this paper we work on the implementation of a node in a NetFPGA card to evaluate the performance of MPSS and D-MPSS mechanisms (proposed in previous works), which use Bloom filters into the packet headers. To build this, it is required to develop some techniques to work with header Bloom filters of variable size, which need compression and decompression in the fastest possible way, optimizing the resources used during the switching decisions. Performance measurements are provided to verify the forwarding efficiency, considering latencies and the comparison between both methods, in which an advantage for D-MPSS is checked.