GA-based automated task assignment on network processors

A problem that must be faced when designing systems based on network processors (NPs) is how to assign the packet-processing tasks to the processor pipeline consisting of many processing engines. Nowadays, this work is done manually, which is error-prone and inefficient. To alleviate this, this paper proposes a genetic algorithmbased method to assign processing tasks to processing engines automatically. Experiments show that this method can quickly obtain near-optimal solutions from the large solution space and the algorithm execution time is decoupled with pipeline stages. © 2005 IEEE.