TCP Processor: Design, Implementation, Operation, and Usage
David V. Schuehler · Open Scholarship Institutional Repository (Washington University in St. Louis) · 2004
There is a critical need to perform advanced data processing on network traffic. In order to accomplish this, protocol processing must first be performed to reassemble individual network packets into consistent data streams representing the exact dataset being transferred between end systems. This task is currently performed by protocol stacks running on end systems. Similar protocol processing operations are needed to process the data on the interior of the network. Given millions of network connections operating on multi-gigabit per second network links, this task is extremely difficult. The TCP-Processor addresses this challenge. It is a hardware circuit designed to perform TCP stream reassembly operations for 8 million bi-directional TCP connections at OC-48 (2.5 Gbps) data rates. This document takes an in-depth look at the TCP-Processor technology, related stream processing applications,