Programmable networking platforms are in the spotlight since the advent of SDN (Software
Defined Networking). It is a great challenge to create such a platform-especially
with reconfigurable hardware and line-rate capabilities reaching and exceeding 100
Gbit/s. These requirements together put FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) technology
into the focus of high performance networking. In this paper, we introduce a highly
flexible, programmable, multipurpose networking platform , which is capable of hosting
multiple 1 and 10 Gbit/s Ethernet interfaces-beside their 40 or 100 Gbit/s interface.
The hardware of the introduced C-GEP platform is reconfigurable, even on-the-fly;
due to the FPGA technology. C-GEP can host a wide range of high-speed network specific
applications – including monitoring, switching and media conversion –, and it is aligned
with the SDN principles. The system consists of two main building blocks: a high performance
FPGA-based custom specific hardware platform and the firmware tailored to the actual
task. The architecture is briefly introduced by its hardware and firmware setup, then
some of the core functionalities, such as packet processing, filtering, and switching
are presented.
