Highly Concurrent TCP Session Connection Management System on FPGA Chip

Abstract

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is a connection-oriented data transmission protocol, and it is also the main communication protocol used for end-to-end data transmission in the current Internet. At present, the mainstream TCP protocol processing service is implemented by software running on the Central Processing Unit (CPU). However, with the rapid growth of transmission bandwidth and the number of connections, the software-based processing method is not ideal in terms of delay and throughput, and also affects the processing performance of the CPU in other applications such as virtualization services. Moreover, other hardware solutions can only support a limited number of TCP session connections. In order to improve the processing efficiency of the TCP protocol and achieve highly concurrent network services, this paper proposes a TCP offload engine (TOE) prototype system based on field programmable gate array (FPGA) chips. It not only provides hardware-based data path processing, but also realizes hardware management of large-scale TCP session connection status through a multi-level cache management mechanism. Studies have shown that this solution can support 100 Gbps high-performance throughput characteristics, and allow concurrent processing of hundreds to 250,000 TCP connection state hardware maintenance on a single network node, improving the overall performance of the network system.