Take a look at the new version of this page: [ beta version ]. Tell us what you think.

ABSTRACT

Our goal is to enable fast prototyping of networking hardware (e.g. modified Ethernet switches and IP routers) for teaching and research. To this end, we built and made available the NetFPGA platform. Starting from open-source reference designs, students and researchers create their designs in Verilog, and then download them to the NetFPGA board where they can process packets at line-rate for 4-ports of 1GE. The board is becoming widely used for teaching and research, and so it has become important to make it easy to re-use modules and designs. We have created a standard interface between modules, making it easier to plug modules together in pipelines, and to create new re-usable designs. In this paper we describe our modular design, and how we have used it to build several systems, including our IP router reference design and some extensions to it.

REFERENCES

• 1: S.-T. Chuang, A. Goel, N. McKeown, and B. Prabhakar. Matching Output Queueing with a Combined Input Output Queued Switch. In INFOCOM (3), pages 1169--1178, 1999.
• 2: Nandita Dukkipati , Glen Gibb , Nick McKeown , Jiang Zhu, Building a RCP (Rate Control Protocol) Test Network, Proceedings of the 15th Annual IEEE Symposium on High-Performance Interconnects, p.91-98, August 22-24, 2007 [doi>10.1109/HOTI.2007.11]
• 3: N. Dukkipati, M. Kobayashi, R. Zhang-Shen, and N. McKeown. Processor Sharing Flows in the Internet. In Thirteenth International Workshop on Quality of Service (IWQoS), 2005.
• 4: M. Enachescu, Y. Ganjali, A. Goel, N. McKeown, and T. Roughgarden. Routers With Very Small Buffers. In IEEE Infocom, 2006.
• 5: N. Gude, T. Koponen, J. Pettit, B. Pfaff, M. Casado, N. McKeown, and S. Shenker. NOX: Towards an Operating System for Networks. To appear.
• 6: Mark Handley , Eddie Kohler , Atanu Ghosh , Orion Hodson , Pavlin Radoslavov, Designing extensible IP router software, Proceedings of the 2nd conference on Symposium on Networked Systems Design & Implementation, p.189-202, May 02-04, 2005
• 7: IEEE. IEEE 1588 - 2002, Precision Time Protocol. Technical report, IEEE, 2002.
• 8: S. Iyer, R. R. Kompella, and N. McKeown. Designing Packet Buffers for Router Line Cards. Technical report, Stanford University High Performance Networking Group, 2002.
• 9: John W. Lockwood , Nick McKeown , Greg Watson , Glen Gibb , Paul Hartke , Jad Naous , Ramanan Raghuraman , Jianying Luo, NetFPGA--An Open Platform for Gigabit-Rate Network Switching and Routing, Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE International Conference on Microelectronic Systems Education, p.160-161, June 03-04, 2007 [doi>10.1109/MSE.2007.69]
• 10: Nick McKeown, The iSLIP scheduling algorithm for input-queued switches, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), v.7 n.2, p.188-201, April 1999 [doi>10.1109/90.769767]
• 11: N. McKeown, T. Anderson, H. Balakrishnan, G. Parulkar, L. Peterson, J. Rexford, S. Shenker, and J. Turner. OpenFlow: Enabling Innovation in College Networks. Soon to appear in ACM Computer Communication Review.
• 12: NetFPGA Development Team. NetFPGA User's and Developer's Guide. Can be found at http://netfpga.org/static/guide.html.
• 13: OpenFlow Consortium. OpenFlow Switch Specification. Available at http://openflowswitch.org/documents.html.
• 14: Stanford University. Pee-Wee OSPF Protocol Details. Can be found at http://yuba.stanford.edu/cs344 public/docs/pwospf ref.txt

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  B. Hardware
  B.6 LOGIC DESIGN
      B.6.1 Design Styles
          Subjects: Sequential circuits

Additional Classification:
  B. Hardware
  B.6 LOGIC DESIGN
      B.6.1 Design Styles
          Subjects: Parallel circuits

  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.5 Local and Wide-Area Networks
          Subjects: Internet (e.g., TCP/IP); Ethernet (e.g., CSMA/CD); High-speed (e.g., FDDI, fiber channel, ATM)
      C.2.6 Internetworking
          Subjects: Routers

General Terms:
Design

Keywords:
modular design, netfpga, reuse