A Reconfigurable Platform for Multi-Service Edge Routers

A main feature of current FPGAs is that they can be dynamically reconfigured to meet the network traffic requirements. In this paper we present a case study for a multi-service edge router in which the number of processors and co-processors is dynamically reconfigured to meet the network traffic workload. The system targets the Xilinx Virtex4 FPGA platform and uses the MicroBlaze soft processors for header processing and hardware acceleration units for payload processing. Furthermore, two schemes are compared for the reconfiguration of the system. The first one has fast response time but is prone to network burst traffic while the second one has slower response time but is more robust to burst traffic. The performance evaluation shows that the reconfigurable platform can achieve up to 1.5x speedup compared to a static system.