High performance DFA-based string matching

On communication networks, deep-packet inspection (DPI) techniques are used to handle various requirements, such as network security, network quality-of-service and so on. DPI is a technique to scan packets to detect specific patterns from those packets and to identify those packets according to the scanning result and the purpose of requirements. String matching is a key element of DPI and is especially used for scanning application specific data of packet payload. In this paper, I propose a string matching architecture to process multiple characters at a single cycle and a technique to speed up the string matching process. The evaluation results show that the memory efficiency and the processing speed can be enhanced by the proposed approach, compared to the previous works.