High-Throughput Bit-Pattern Matching under Heavy Interference on FPGA

Abstract

Bit-pattern matching is an important technological capability, used in many fields such as network intrusion detection (NID) and packet classification systems. Essentially, it involves the matching of an input bit pattern to a bit-pattern entry of a memory structure inside the system. Contemporary methods focus on the decomposition of the input bit pattern into smaller and more manageable parts, with the subsequent parallel processing of these elements. This fragmentation promotes the use of advanced pipeline techniques and hardware optimizations, enabling these methods to achieve very high throughputs and reasonable efficiency. However, the functionality of their respective circuits is limited to only performing pattern matching when there is no interference. In this article, we intend to present a circuit that performs pattern matching under heavy interference; instead of fragmentation, a more holistic approach will be adopted. To improve the throughput of the circuit, long bit sequences will be directly compared to many memory entries simultaneously. The minimization of hardware consumption and maximization of efficiency in these comparisons will be achieved with the use of novel hardware architecture that is based on pipelined adder trees and comparators. The platform of implementation is an FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array).