UML-driven TTA-based protocol processor design

A protocol processor is a programmable processor specifically designed to deal efficiently with protocols. The challenge in designing protocol processors is finding an architecture that is a good compromise between a general purpose processor and a custom, protocol-specific processor. We describe a methodology in which we design both a processor and a program for a network processing application. Our design flow is based on object oriented techniques and targets a TTA processor architecture. TTA is a special processor architecture whose instruction set can easily be tailored. It consists of a number of functional units that are implemented in hardware. One of the tasks in our methods is to identify such functional units. We explain the design flow steps with an IPv6 router implementation.