Towards Adaptive Networking for Embedded Devices based on Reconfigurable Hardware

Research in communication networks has shown that the Internet architecture is not sufficient for modern communication areas such as the interconnection networks of super computing centers or sensor and mobile networks. Stringent requirements with respect to performance, cost, and power consumption paired with an increasing demand for flexibility ask for run-time optimization of the computing and communication functionalities. Specifically, the ability to adapt the communication protocol stack to the current needs of the application at run-time is a key element for optimally operating such a network of dedicated compute nodes. In this paper, we introduce the concept of a reconfigurable system-on-chip infrastructure for implementing adaptive protocol stacks. Our proposed architecture leverages research in the areas of adaptive networks and reconfigurable computing to provide a hardware/software platform that allows for runtime reconfiguration of existing network protocol stacks, deployment and removal of protocols, migration of packet processing tasks from software to hardware and vice versa, and efficient packet forwarding between different processing tasks.