Fault tolerant practices on network processors for dependable network processing

In this paper, we study how to provide dependable network processing through multi-core based network processors (NPs). We present the performance analysis results of an NP based network system and motivate our research. We propose to use the redundant cores available in an NP to handle faults. We outline a fault-tolerant (FT) task model specifically for NP based applications and describe our implementation taking advantage of hardware features of an Intel IXP2xxx NP. A set of experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance and effectiveness of a FT-enabled NP system. The experiment results show that our fault- tolerant design can effectively improve the schedulability of the system.