Dynamically Reconfigurable Queue for Intel IXP2400 Network Processor

Abstract

Network Processor (NP) is a programmable processor, which is used for packet processing in Network applications. Nowadays, many vendors are manufacturing different models of NPs for various applications. The major difference between each model is the number of microengines (ME), which varies from 6 to 32 (e.g., 6 or 8 or 16 or 32). The main objective of the Dynamic Reconfiguration in this work, is to optimize the usage of MEs depending on the network traffic fluctuation. The usage of MEs is either increased or decreased depending on the packet queue length. This paper proposes a new queuing system for dynamically reconfigurable NPs for traffic fluctuation. The number of MEs used, is dynamically increased when the queue size was increased by k packets and it was dynamically decreased when queue size reduced. We have used Intel IXP2400 NP for validating the queuing model for different traffic fluctuations.