General memory efficient packet matching FPGA architecture for future high-speed networks

Packet classification (matching) is one of the critical operations in networking widely used in many different devices and tasks ranging from switching or routing to a variety of monitoring and security applications like firewall or IDS. To satisfy the ever-growing performance demands of current and future high-speed networks, specially designed hardware accelerated architectures implementing packet classification are necessary. These demands are now growing to such an extent, that in order to keep up with the rising throughputs of network links, the FPGA accelerated architectures are required to perform matching of multiple packets in every single clock cycle. To meet this requirement a simple replication approach can be utilized – instantiate multiple copies of a processing pipeline matching incoming packets in parallel. However, simple replication of pipelines inseparably brings a significant increase in utilization of FPGA resources of all types, which is especially costly for rather scarce on-chip memories used in matching tables.