A High-Speed, Scalable, and Programmable Traffic Manager Architecture for Flow-Based Networking

In this paper, we present a programmable and scalable traffic manager (TM) architecture, targeting requirements of high-speed networking devices, especially in the software-defined networking context. This TM is intended to ease the deployability of new architectures through field-programmable gate array (FPGA) platforms and to make the data plane programmable and scalable. Flow-based networking allows treating traffic in terms of flows rather than as a simple aggregation of individual packets, which simplifies scheduling and bandwidth allocation for each flow. Programmability brings agility, flexibility, and rapid adaptation to changes, allowing to meet network requirements in real-time. Traffic management with fast queuing and reduced latency plays an important role to support the upcoming 5G cellular communication technology. The proposed TM architecture is coded in C++ and is synthesized with the Vivado High-Level Synthesis tool. This TM is capable of supporting links operating beyond 40 Gb/s, on the ZC706 board and XCVU440-FLGB2377–3-E FPGA device from Xilinx, while achieving 80 Gb/s and 100 Gb/s throughput, respectively. The resulting placed and routed design was tested on the ZC706 board with its embedded ARM processor controlling table updates.