DATA PLANE TECHNOLOGY INCLUDING PACKET PROCESSING FOR NETWORK PROCESSORS

摘要

Methods and apparatus for abstracting network processors using a virtual machine (16). The virtual machine approach substantially abstracts the network processor, letting the application developer focus all attention on packet processing. The NPU-based (100) virtual machine (16) provides the functionality of a pipelined engine, N-way parallelism, or both. A high-level functional language (12, 14) is provided for expressing a wide variety of packet processing applications. The high-level functional language provides primitives in the form of instructions such as, but not limited to, tracking a connection or session, removing an outer header, translating an IP address, encrypting a packet, and scanning the payload for a regular expression.