A scalable high-performance router platform supporting dynamic service extensibility on network and host processors

Emerging network services such as transcoding and encryption need application-specific handling of data streams within the network, thus requiring enormous computational capabilities on routers to process packets at link speed. Recently appeared Network Processors (NPs) are able to significantly increase the available processing capacities on a router by a chip-multi-processor architecture. Embedded within the network interface card, NPs provide several code-extensible processors with different capabilities located at various layers. However, the increase in processing capacity comes at the cost of a higher complexity to program and control various processor hierarchies provided on the router.