Design of a High-Performance RSVP-TE Hardware Signaling Accelerator

Signaling protocols, primarily used to set up and teardown connections, are essential in connection-oriented networks. Up to now, signaling protocols are mostly implemented in software for two reasons: complexity and the requirement for flexibility. Adversely, the price paid is in performance. Software implementations of signaling protocols are rarely capable of handling over 1000 calls/s. Corresponding call setup delays per switch are in the order of milliseconds. To improve performance for high-speed networks, we implemented a subset of the resource reservation protocol—traffic engineering signaling protocol in reconfigurable field programmable gate array hardware. Our implementation demonstrates the feasibility of 1000x speedup vis-À-vis software implementations. The impact of this work is far-reaching in that it enables connection-oriented networks to support new applications that require rate guarantees but have short call holding times.