A Packet Classifier Based on Prefetching EVMDD (k) Machines

ADecision DiagramMachine (DDM) is a special-purpose processor that has special instructions to evaluate a decision diagram. Since the DDM uses only a limited number of instructions, it is faster than the general-purposeMicro Processor Unit (MPU). Also, the architecture for the DDM is much simpler than that for an MPU. This paper presents a packet classifier using a parallel EVMDD (k) machine. To reduce computation time and code size, first, a set of rules for a packet classifier is partitioned into groups. Then, the parallel EVMDD (k) machine evaluates them. To further speed-up for the standard EVMDD (k) machine, we propose the prefetching EVMDD (k) machine which reads both the index and the jump address at the same time. The prefetching EVMDD (k) machine is 2.4 times faster than the standard one using the same memory size. We implemented a parallel prefetching EVMDD (k) machine consisting of 30 machines on an FPGA, and compared it with the Intel’s Core i5 microprocessor running at 1.7GHz. Our parallel machine is 15.1–77.5 times faster than the Core i5, and it requires only 8.1–58.5 percents of the memory for the Core i5. key words: many core, packet classification, decision diagram, multivalued logic