Front End Device for Content Networking

The bandwidth and speed of network connections are continually increasing. The speed increase in network technology is set to soon outpace the speed increase in CMOS technology. This asymmetrical growth is beginning to causing software applications that once worked with then current levels of network traffic to flounder under the new high data rates. Processes that were once executed in software now have to be executed, partially if not wholly in hardware. One such application that could benefit from hardware implementation is high layer routing. By allowing a network device to peer into higher layers of the OSI model, the device can scan for viruses, provide higher quality-of-service (QoS), and efficiently route packets. This paper proposes an architecture for a device that will utilize hardware-level string matching to distribute incoming requests for a server farm. The proposed architecture is implemented in VHDL, synthesized, and laid out on an Altera FPGA.