Cooperative Mechanism of Local Memory and Cache in Network Processors

Abstract

Traditional network processors (NPs) adopt either local memory mechanism or cache mechanism as the hierarchical memory structure. The local memory mechanism usually has small on-chip memory space which is not fit for the various complicated applications. The cache mechanism is better at dealing with the temporary data which need to be read and written frequently. But in deep packet processing, cache miss occurs when reading each segment of packet. We propose a cooperative mechanism of local memory and cache. In which the packet data and temporary data are stored into local memory and cache respectively. The analysis and experimental evaluation shows that the cooperative mechanism can improve the performance of network processors and reduce processing latency with little extra resources cost.