An FPGA-Based High-Performance Stateful Packet Processing Method

Abstract

Compared to a stateless data plane, a stateful data plane offloads part of state information and control logic from a controller to a data plane to reduce communication overhead and improve packet processing efficiency. However, existing methods for implementing stateful data planes face challenges, particularly maintaining state consistency during packet processing and improving throughput performance. This paper presents a high-performance, FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array)-based stateful packet processing approach, which addresses these challenges utilizing the PHV (Packet Header Vector) dynamic scheduling technique to ensure flow state consistency. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method could operate at 200 MHz while adding 3–12 microseconds latency. The method we proposed also provides a considerable degree of programmability.