Design space exploration of configuration manager for network processing applications

Current FPGAs provide a powerful platform for network processing applications. The main challenge is the exploitation of the reconfiguration to increase the performance of the system. In this paper, a design space exploration framework is presented to design a reconfigurable platform for multi-service network processing applications. An integrated design flow is presented from the system level analytical design to the implementation level. Furthermore, the design of an efficient configuration manager is presented in which the platform adaptation is performed for optimum speedup with minimum overhead taking into account the reconfiguration overhead and the network characteristics (packet type distribution, network stability). Finally, a case study is presented in which the platform is used to process three network flows with different processing requirements.