Modeling Filtering Predicates Composition with Finite State Automata

Network virtualization has gained a lot of attention recently, because of some new interesting proposals in the field (i.e. Open Flow). This trend has had the effect of pushing some filtering operations up at the software level: i.e. extract a potentially large number of protocol fields from a packet, or dynamically combine different filters. The time constraints of working at line rate force the creation of a packet filter model that can guarantee the minimum number of packet checks. This poster proposes mp FSA, a packet filter model based on the Finite State Automata formalism, that aims at achieving optimality w.r.t. the number of packet accesses, without sacrificing efficiency and scalability.