P4-Compatible High-Level Synthesis of Low Latency 100 Gb/s Streaming Packet Parsers in FPGAs

Packet parsing is a key step in SDN-aware devices. Packet parsers in SDN networks need to be both reconfigurable and fast, to support the evolving network protocols and the increasing multi-gigabit data rates. The combination of packet processing languages with FPGAs seems to be the perfect match for these requirements. In this work, we develop an open-source FPGA-based configurable architecture for arbitrary packet parsing to be used in SDN networks. We generate low latency and high-speed streaming packet parsers directly from a packet processing program. Our architecture is pipelined and entirely modeled using templated \textttC++ classes. The pipeline layout is derived from a parser graph that corresponds to a P4 code after a series of graph transformation rounds. The RTL code is generated from the \textttC++ description using Xilinx Vivado HLS and synthesized with Xilinx Vivado. Our architecture achieves a \SI100 \giga\bit/\second data rate in a Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGA while reducing the latency by 45% and the LUT usage by 40% compared to the state-of-the-art.