A novel network node architecture for high performance and function flexibility

We developed a flexible network node that is tuned for high-speed and multilayer packet manipulation. The key idea is a dynamic function assignment mechanism; each packet processing task is assigned to several processing modules in an on-the-fly manner and incoming packets are processed in them. With this mechanism, we can freely arrange the modules and add extra ones if more processing power is needed. In addition, the processing modules are realized using field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and microprocessing units (MPUs). Thus, the functionality of each module can be dynamically changed at any time. In this paper, the system concept and its implementation are described with an example application.