Towards High-Performance Pattern Matching on Multi-Core Network Processing Platforms

With the continual growth of network speed and the increasing sophistication of network applications, keeping network operations efficient and secure becomes more challenging. Pattern matching is one of the key technologies for content-ware network processing, such as traffic classification, application identification and intrusion prevention. In this paper, we propose a hybrid pattern matching algorithm optimized for multi-core network processing platforms. As a system-level solution, our scheme focuses on both performance stability and hardware/software co-design. To verify the effectiveness of our design, the proposed algorithm is implemented on a state-of-art 16-MIPS-core network processing platform and evaluated with real-life data sets. Experimental results show that, when compared with the traditional Aho-Corasick algorithm, our hybrid solution saves 60~95% memory space while guarantees stable performance on large pattern sets and against adverse test traffic.