C-GEP: Adaptive network management with reconfigurable hardware

Carrying out network monitoring tasks remains a continuous challenge, partially because the line rate reaches and exceeds 100 Gbit/s. Besides the increasing data rate, the advent of programmable networks necessitates efficient solutions for supporting packet processing tasks in an adaptive way. Introducing a modification of a protocol or any new protocol in such a flexible infrastructure implies a novel management approach incorporating network monitoring equipment with reconfigurable architecture. The requirement for high throughput and high level of reconfiguration together put Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology into the focus of high performance networking. In this paper, we introduce a programmable, multi-purpose network platform called C-GEP that is based on a reconfigurable architecture. The system consists of two main building blocks: a high performance FPGA-based custom hardware platform and a firmware dedicated for network monitoring. We present the architecture focusing on the system-level integration of specific packet processors. The integration of processing building blocks into one high performance system has great challenges. These are primarily related to specific, limiting factors of system resources - which we discuss also in this paper.