FPGA Implementation of IP Packet Header Parsing Hardware

The rapid expansion of Internet has caused enormous increase in number of users, servers, connections and demands for new applications, services, and protocols in the modern multi-gigabit computer networks. The technology advances have resulted with significant increase of network connection links capacities, especially with the support for fiber-optic communications, while on the other hand the networking router's hardware and software have experienced many difficulties to timely satisfy the novel imposed requirements for high throughput, bandwidth and speed, and low delays. Considering that most network processors spend a significant part of processor cycles to provide IP packet header field access by means of general-purpose processing, in this paper we propose a specialized IP header parsing hardware that is intended to provide much faster IP packet processing, by allowing direct access to non byte- or word-aligned fields found in IPv4/IPv6 packet headers. The proposed IP packet header parser is designed as a specialized hardware logic that is added to the memory where the IP packet headers are placed; and is described in VHDL and then implemented in Virtex7 VC709 Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) board. The simulation timing diagrams and FPGA synthesis (implementation) reports are discussed and analyzed in this paper