Programmable hardware

The activity is oriented on research and development of specialised tools based on programmable hardware, in particular field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA). The devices under development are intended for network traffic monitoring and other network-oriented applications. In 2008, the major goal will be first cards of the new hardware family COMBO2 that is designed to handle data traffic up to 40 Gbps.

The main task in firmware development will be consolidation and testing of the NetCOPE platform and migration of applications (especially FlowMon and NIFIC) to this platform. NetCOPE will also be ported to the new COMBO2 cards. In the GN2 project, we will further work on developing the FlowMon probe for IP flow monitoring and helping with its deployment in partners' networks, including the CESNET2 network. In the new version of FlowMon we will develop several advanced functions such as variable flow record, L7 decoder and measurements of time-related characteristics of flows. As a new research direction, we will investigate the possibilities for hardware acceleration of virtual routers.