Design of a web switch in a reconfigurable platform

The increase of the web traffic has created the need for web switches that are able to balance the traffic to the server farms based on their contents (e.g. layer 7 switching). In this paper we present a web switch implemented in a multiprocessor reconfigurable platform augmented with hardware co-processors. The system supports the TCP splicing scheme to accelerate the routing of the packets by forwarding packets at the IP layer after a connection has been spliced. The processors are alleviated using special co-processors for the management of the spliced connection and the URL string parsing. The proposed scheme can sustain up to 927 Mbps throughput for 64 KB request file size consuming less than 1 Watt in a Xilinx Virtex4 FPGA. Hence, the system provides an efficient combination of processor's flexibility and ASIC's performance. Finally, the system is compared against a network processor-based and a software content-based switch in terms of performance, area, and power.