A Survey on Network Processors

Network Processors are application specific processors that are used for network domain problems such as packet classification, admission control and intrusion detection. To cope with the changing protocols and high speed network services, communication devices need to be flexible as well as high performing. A Network Processor is a programmable device, consists of some hardware accelerators facilitating flexibility as well as wire speed network operations. In this Paper, we survey on three widely known network processors named PayloadPlus marketed by Agere systems, PowerNP from IBM and IXP1200 from Intel corporation