HERO: High-speed enhanced routing operation in software routers NICs

Increasing attention has been recently devoted to software routers based on off-the-shelf hardware and open-source operating systems running on personal computer (PC) architectures. Today's high-end PCs PCI shared buses fit into the multi-gigabit-per-second routing segment, for a price much lower than that of commercial routers. However, commercially available Network Interface Cards (NICs) lack programmability, and require not only packets to cross the PCI bus twice, but also to process them in software by the operating system (OS), reducing routing performance. In this paper we discuss the design of an FPGA-based NIC that permits to overcome the limitations of commercial NICs and provide a detailed description of its implementation.