Hardware support for RSVP capable routing

Today's FPGA technology allows reconfigurable hardware to be integrated into standard PC hardware as well as into dedicated router systems. With a hardware like this it is possible to offer support for CPU intense parts of the forwarding process within a router. With upcoming services like RSVP additional demands is put on processing power within routers. This paper presents an implementation of several aspects of RSVP state handling in hardware in order to relieve the router or interface CPU of some aspects of RSVP processing. Special focus is on RSVP table maintenance. The RSVP implementation uses the happlet (hardware applet) concept of Harbaum et al. (see Proceedings of ARCS '99, Jena, Germany, October 1999) to interface between the hardware based routines and the system kernel and user-space programs.