Research of Flexible Protocol Development Software Framework Based on Network Processor

With rapid progress of WWW application, new network protocols and advanced network services come forth more quickly. To develop and deploy kinds of new protocols, network processors (NPs) would be good choice, which can be programmed easily and quickly according to specific products and deployment needs. But in fact, its difficult to develop software for NPs because of their complex design, architectural heterogeneity, and demanding performance constraints. In this paper, the programming view of NPs is studied and a flexible protocol development software framework is proposed, which considers function partition of protocol into two parts for specific NP and general-purpose processor, then emphasizes the design of integrated coordinated NPs software development toolkits. Eventually, as a case, extension of new function of MPLS VPN protocol is presented to prove the efficiency of the methodology