A hardware-accelerated implementation of the RSVP-TE signaling protocol

Signaling protocols are primarily implemented in software for two reasons: protocol complexity and the requirement for flexibility. While these are two good reasons for implementing signaling protocols in software, the price paid is in performance. Software implementations of signaling protocols are rarely capable of handling over 1000 calls/sec. Corresponding call setup delays per switch are in the order of milliseconds. To improve performance for high-speed networks, we implemented RSVP-TE signaling protocol in reconfigurable FPGA hardware. Our implementation demonstrates the feasibility of 100x and potentially 1000x speed-up vis-a-vis software implementation. The impact of this work can be quite far-reaching by allowing connection-oriented networks to support a variety of new applications, even those with short call holding times.