A new protocol processing architecture for high-speed networks

Conventional protocol processing has become a bottleneck in taking advantage of the opportunities presented by high-speed networks like ATM. Here, we describe a super high-speed protocol processor (SHiPP) architecture for protocol processing that increases speed by fine-grain parallel processing. The other feature of SHiPP is that it can be programmed by using content addressable memory (CAM) and field programmable gate arrays (FPGA). Experimentally, we apply SHiPP to the service specific connection oriented protocol (SSCOP). The SHIPP has achieved processing rates of about 4.3 /spl mu/s per packet, about 28 times as fast as software implementations.