CAFE: A Configurable pAcket Forwarding Engine for Data Center Networks
- Guohan Lu ,
- Yunfeng Shi ,
- Chuanxiong Guo ,
- Yongguang Zhang
ACM SIGCOMM PRESTO Workshop |
Published by Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.
Recently, Data Center Networking (DCN) has attracted many research attentions and innovative DCN designs have been proposed . All these designs need specialized packet forwarding engines due to their special routing algorithms, which are either based on commonly used packet headers or self-defined ones. Although programmable forwarding devices are available, it is difficult to use them to prototype these DCN designs, especially when self-defined headers are introduced. In this paper, we present a hardware based Configurable pAcket Forwarding Engine (CAFE) to facilitate the prototyping process. Through simple APIs, CAFE can be easily configured to forward self-defined packets, modify, insert, and delete arbitrary packet header fields without re-designing the hardware. We have implemented CAFE using NetFPGA. Evaluation demonstrates that CAFE can be easily configured and it can forward packets at line-rate.
Copyright © 2007 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Publications Dept, ACM Inc., fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org. The definitive version of this paper can be found at ACM's Digital Library --http://www.acm.org/dl/.