An Innovative Approach for Regular Expression Matching Based on NoC Architecture

Abstract

An new regular expression (regex) matching method based on Network-on-Chip(NoC) architecture is proposed in this paper. The idea is to combine a new kind of regex matching engine implemented in hardware with NoC architecture to get a high matching rate. The Regex matching was performed by partitioning the regex into several parts to make the finite state machine (FSM) simpler. Each part of regex can be matched by an engine cell core, and each core communicates with other cores by routers on a NOC topology. This method is suitable for different rule libraries in Deep packet inspection (DPI) and is easy to change the rule library of regex stored in memory. The engine was designed and implemented based on field programming gate array (FPGA) as a prototype and a model to implement the architecture in Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC) is also discussed in this paper. The experimental results show that this method can make regex matching much faster than traditional methods.