Design of an Enhanced 10Gb/s Ethernet MAC Controller for DCB Offloading on FPGA

DCB (Data Center Bridging) is usually implemented by protocol stack software. This causes relatively slow speed with high processor power consumption when the network traffics. To improve the performance of the network, hardware could undertake some operations. As hardware can detect PFC frame generation and scheduling of ETS, in this paper, we proposed a design to offload the operations of PFC and ETS onto FPGA. The design was functionally verified on Xilinx Virtex-6. An enhanced 10 Gb/s Ethernet Media Access Control (MAC) controller was thus implemented. Moreover, this module can be applied not only in FCoE converged network, but also other lossless Ethernet.