FPGA-based line-rate packet forwarding for the SCION future Internet architecture

Kamila Soucková, Adrian Perrig, Benjamin Rothenberger
2019
The SCION future Internet architecture is designed to provide route control, failure isolation, and explicit trust information for end-to-end communication. Its viability has already been demonstrated in production, but to work at Internet scale, it is necessary to make it perform at high bandwidth, reduce costs, and evaluate its suitability for eventual implementation in hardware. This project implements a SCION border router capable of line-rate packet forwarding, running on an FPGA target.
more » ... utilise P4, an emerging language for programming packet forwarding planes. This enables target independence, a quicker development cycle, and a more modular approach. Based on this work, we suggest changes to the SCION data plane that allow for more efficient processing in hardware. I am also very grateful to Philip Paeps for tirelessly answering my barrage of hardware-related questions. His help was essential for making progress quickly despite not having previous hardware design experience. Many thanks for reviewing the draft of this thesis go to Stephen Shirley. His ever-present criticism was surprisingly constructive. Finally, I wish to thank Andrés Hamann for reviewing the draft, as well as for generally bearing with me and being an excellent rubber duck. Andrés is awesome. v Internet architecture, with the goals of scalability, route control, failure isolation, and explicit trust information in the design.
doi:10.3929/ethz-b-000372370 fatcat:zjpggtkns5bylpw7plby2tag2m