UC Santa Cruz

The network switch is one of the core components of computer communications, functioning as the interconnect among ever increasing number of nodes and a variety of networks. Whether it is used in data centers for connecting large numbers of nodes with high storage and computational capacities, or in the Internet backbone as a core router carrying vast quantity of information among its users, or in medium to large sized local area networks including educational campuses and companies, the switches require ever increasing design needs for scalability, high delivery ratios, low latencies, and quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees.

We believe that switch design should be evaluated as a holistic aspect of network protocol design, since many metrics in protocol design and switch design are closely correlated. Moreover, designing a switch requires the integration of hardware and software, because different functionalities of the switch can be implemented in hardware, software or both depending on different design considerations.

Rapid increase in Software Defined Networks (SDN) related research denotes that the approach of abstracting the data plane from the control plane, thus achieving higher flexibility and architectural simplicity, accounts for a notable research problem. Furthermore, label switching based routing algorithms enable the forwarding layer to be implemented at hardware and thus inflict less per-hop latency. Introducing a hardware component into network protocol design might initially seem to combine two orthogonal design components, however the outcome is an architecture that achieves multiple levels of abstraction, flexibility, simplicity, scalability and high performance at once.

In this thesis, we propose a novel architecture with an emphasis on hardware-software co-design paradigm, resulting in a scalable, flexible and high performance switch. We show that our design can be fully implemented on a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based platform. Our system demonstrates an attempt to improve SDN, by taking the hardware component into account in the design flow, resulting in our Software-HArdware co-Defined nEtwork Switch (SHADES) for a label switched routing protocol, delivering load balancing, low latencies, and high delivery ratios.