BURAQ: A Dynamically Reconfigurable System for Stateful Measurement of Network Traffic

Programmable analysis of network traffic is critical for wide range of higher level traffic engineering and anomaly detection applications. Such applications demand stateful and programmable network traffic measurements (NTM) at high throughputs. We exploit the features and requirements of NTM, and develop an application-specific FPGA based Partial Dynamic Reconfiguration (PDR) scheme that is tailored to NTM problem. PDR has traditionally been done through swapping of statically compiled FPGA configuration data. Besides being latency intensive, static compilation cannot take into account exact requirements as they appear during real-time in many applications like NTM. In this paper, we make novel use of fine-grained PDR, performing minute logic changes in real-time and demonstrate its effectiveness in a prototype solution for programmable and real-time NTM. We specifically make use of flexibility available through the application and present a number of novel tools and algorithms that enabled developing the BURAQ system. Our results show 4x area and 1.3x latency improvements of BURAQ from a comparative statically compiled recent solution.