Construction of Effective Automata for Regex Matching in HW

This thesis is motivated by the application of REs in domains requiring fast matching such has deep packet inspections. To ensure sufficient speed a HW acceleration is typically employed. During the acceleration, REs are in the form of NFA synthesized on FPGA. Although HW acceleration solves the speed problems, it suffers from increased consumption of the FPGA components, specifically LUT. The goal of this thesis is to design, implement and experimentally evaluate heuristic method for approximation of FA in context of HW accelerated RE matching. The purpose of this approximation is to lower consumption of LUT components during FPGA synthesis. The key idea of the method is to add some transitions allowing to construct a smaller number of character classes and thus to reduce the number of LUT implementing the transition relation while reducing the error by modifying only less significant parts of FA. Proposed method together with evaluation pipeline is implemented in TOFA tool. Technique was evaluated on both synthetic and real data. Results of experiments shows, that transitional approximation works especially well on automatas with large number of equivalence character classes