Dynamic Reconfiguration of Real-Time Network Interfaces

Vonnahme E, Griese G, Porrmann M, Rückert U. Dynamic Reconfiguration of Real-Time Network Interfaces. In: IEEE Computer Society. Technical Committee on Parallel Processing, Technische Universität Dresden. Technical Committee on Parallel Processing, eds. Parallel Computing in Electrical Engineering, 2004. PARELEC 2004. International Conference on. Los Alamitos, Calif. : IEEE Comput. Soc; 2004: 376-379.The programmable resources of reconfigurable computing architectures are commonly used to support application specific processing. Dynamic reconfiguration enables hardware adaptation even during run-time. This paper concentrates on extending the application of dynamically reconfigurable logic to the area of network interface logic. The benefits and consequences of implementing even low-level networking functions in programmable hardware over fixed realizations are explained, and the possibilities arising from reconfigurable network interfaces are shown. Concerning reconfiguration of the network interface subsystem at run-time, maintaining connections, preventing packet loss, and guaranteeing response times during reconfiguration is crucial. Methods for dynamically replacing network interface hardware are described, and the current prototype is shown