An FPGA based soft multiprocessor for DNS/DNSSEC authoritative server

Abstract

This paper deals with the idea of implementing a complete network service on a chip. Herein, we propose an original design together with an efficient implementation of an authoritative domain name system (DNS) server on a Virtex 5 FPGA circuit. The proposed approach exploits the use of a hardware accelerator, MicroBlaze soft-processor cores and an adequate mapping between the DNS specifications and the hardware architecture leading to a Multi-Processor System on Chip (MPSoC). We propose new architectures by translating the DNS specifications to hardware form through the “Specification and Description Language” (SDL) tool. The proposed implementation allows significant reduction in power consumption together with significant performance and security improvement. The proposed architectures have been successfully implemented and tested on an actual network. The obtained results show a query performance improvement of around 200% with respect to the “Berkeley Internet Name Domain” (BIND) 9 server.