HARDWARE ACCELERATOR FOR TUNNEL PROCESSING

摘要

A node for a communications system has a hardware accelerator that supports communications using any of a variety of different, UDP-based, tunnel protocols, and a tunnel software application configures the hardware accelerator to operate for any of the supported tunnel protocols. The hardware accelerator works for any UDP-based, non-cryptographic tunnel protocol. The tunnel software application provides the hardware accelerator with particular instances of generic outbound and inbound profiles that define the header fields for particular tunnel protocols. The hardware accelerator uses those profiles respectively to encapsulate and decapsulate outbound and inbound packets. In this way, tunnel processing is accelerated without having to provide different hardware accelerators for different tunnel protocols.

主权项

1. A first node, comprising:
a hardware accelerator configurable to support any of a plurality of different tunnel protocols; and a tunnel software application programmed to configure the hardware accelerator to support communications sessions for any of the plurality of tunnel protocols using specific outbound and inbound profiles corresponding to generic outbound and inbound profiles that respectively define encapsulation and decapsulation processing implemented by the hardware accelerator for a specific communications session.