Design of a Multipurpose Whitebox Networking Platform
In this paper, the authors present a prototype implementation of a multipurpose network platform which could be easily adapted to accommodate various types of future networks. Their design is motivated by the objective to overcome the drawbacks of existing whitebox networking devices in flexibility and performance points of view. Instead of relying on two extreme ends; ASIC or general purpose CPU, they propose a multipurpose platform which combines the moderate flexibility and rich features for fast packet processing of high-performance network processor, and almost the same flexibility as a general purpose CPU and the offloading functions such as security and deep packet inspection of multicore processor.