High-performance FPGA network switch architecture

Abstract

We present a high-throughput FPGA design for supporting high-performance network switching. FPGAs have recently been attracting attention for datacenter computing due to their increasing transceiver count and capabilities, which also benefit the implementation and refinement of network switches. Our solution replaces the crossbar in favour of a novel, more pipeline-friendly approach, the “Combined parallel round-robin arbiter”. It also removes the overhead of incorporating an often-iterative scheduling or matching algorithm, which sometimes tries to fit too many steps in a single or a few FPGA cycles. The result is a network switch implementation on FPGAs operating at a high frequency and with a low port-to-port latency. It also provides a wiser buffer memory utilisation than traditional Virtual Output Queue (VOQ)-based switches and is able to keep 100% throughput for a wider range of traffic patterns using a fraction of the buffer memory and shorter packets.