NetFPGA: A Tool for Network Research and Education

Summary

This paper describes NetFPGA, a project that is designed to give students practical experience with networking concepts at the physical and link layer. Students can use NetFPGA to build real networking hardware and because of its low cost, can connect many together to build interesting networking systems.

Till now, there have been 2 versions of NetFPGA. Version 1 includes 3 FPGA's, one of which is the Control FPGA, preprogrammed to connect the Etehrnet controller to the other 2 User FPGA's. The students built a simple logic analyzer in order to be able to see the signals in a waveform viewer.

There were several limitations to Version 1:

• Board format was awkward, requiring self-assembly
• Too slow for research projects
• No on-board CPU
• Windows not a possible development platform

This led to Version 2 of the NetFPGA. Version 2 switched to the PCI format which was beneficial because most users were already familiar with this format and it had greater bandwidth. It also possible to use ModelSim on XP to develop.

Future work includes further testing to analyze configuration and hardware problems in addition to improving the logic analyzer.

RCP and Intrustion Detection at ICSI are 2 projects currently making use of NetFPGA.

Critique & Questions

This was a quick read and a good introduction to NetFPGAs.