Deep Packet Inspection Through Virtual Platforms using System-On-Chip FPGAs

Virtual platforms provide a full hardware/software platform to study device limitations in an early stages of the design flow and to develop software without requiring a physical implementation. This paper describes the development process of a virtual platform for Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) hardware accelerators by using Transaction Level Modeling (TLM). We propose two DPI architectures oriented to System-on-Chip FPGA. The first architecture, CPU-DMA based architecture, is a hybrid CPU/FPGA where the packets are filtered in the software domain. The second architecture, Hardware-IP based architecture, is mainly implemented in the hardware domain. We have created two virtual platforms and performed the simulation, the debugging and the analysis of the hardware/software features, in order to compare results for both architectures.