Hardware implementation of a signaling protocol

Signaling protocols in switches are primarily implemented in software for two important reasons. First, signaling protocols are quite complex with many messages, parameters and procedures. Second, signaling protocols are updated frequently requiring a certain amount of flexibility for upgrading field implementations. While these are two good reasons for implementing signaling protocols in software, there is an associated performance penalty. Even with state-of-the-art processors, software implementations of signaling protocol are rarely capable of handling over 1000 calls/sec. Correspondingly, call setup delays per switch are in the order of milliseconds. Towards improving performance we implemented a signaling protocol in reconfigurable FPGA hardware. Our implementation demonstrates the feasibility of 100x-1000x speedup vis-a-vis software implementations on state-of-the-art processors. 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.

[1]  Koso Murakami,et al.  Control architecture for next-generation communication networks based on distributed databases , 1989, IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun..

[2]  André DeHon,et al.  DPGA-coupled microprocessors: commodity ICs for the early 21st Century , 1994, Proceedings of IEEE Workshop on FPGA's for Custom Computing Machines.

[3]  Tao Li.  Title: towards Enabling a 2-3 Orders of Magnitude Improvement in Call Handling Capacities of Switches , .

[4]  Henning Schulzrinne,et al.  YESSIR: a simple reservation mechanism for the Internet , 1999, CCRV.

[5]  A.G. Waters,et al.  Connection management for an ATM network , 1992, IEEE Network.

[6]  Israel Cidon,et al.  Connection establishment in high-speed networks , 1993, TNET.

[7]  Lixia Zhang,et al.  Resource ReSerVation Protocol (RSVP) - Version 1 Functional Specification , 1997, RFC.

[8]  Malathi Veeraraghavan,et al.  Implementation and analysis of PCC (parallel connection control) , 1997, Proceedings of INFOCOM '97.

[9]  Pierre E. Boyer,et al.  A Reservation Principle with Applications to the ATM Traffic Control , 1992, Comput. Networks ISDN Syst..

[10]  Travis Earl Russell,et al.  Signaling System #7 , 1995 .

[11]  Pablo Molinero-Fernández,et al.  TCP Switching: Exposing Circuits to IP , 2002, IEEE Micro.

[12]  Bernhard Plattner,et al.  Scalable high speed IP routing lookups , 1997, SIGCOMM '97.

[13]  Brad L. Hutchings,et al.  Supporting FPGA microprocessors through retargetable software tools , 1996, 1996 Proceedings IEEE Symposium on FPGAs for Custom Computing Machines.

[14]  Ram Dantu,et al.  Constraint-Based LSP Setup using LDP , 2002, RFC.

[15]  Peter Ashwood-Smith,et al.  Generalized MPLS - Signaling Functional Description , 2000 .

[16]  K. K. Ramakrishnan,et al.  UNITE-an architecture for lightweight signaling in ATM networks , 1998, Proceedings. IEEE INFOCOM '98, the Conference on Computer Communications. Seventeenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies. Gateway to the 21st Century (Cat. No.98.

[17]  Nick McKeown,et al.  Routing lookups in hardware at memory access speeds , 1998, Proceedings. IEEE INFOCOM '98, the Conference on Computer Communications. Seventeenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies. Gateway to the 21st Century (Cat. No.98.

[18]  Adrian Segall,et al.  Distributed network control for wavelength routed optical networks , 1996, Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM '96. Conference on Computer Communications.