FPL-3: Towards language support for distributed packet processing

The FPL-3 packet filtering language incorporates explicit support for distributed processing into the language. FPL-3 supports not only generic header-based filtering, but also more demanding tasks, such as payload scanning, packet replication and traffic splitting. By distributing FPL-3 based tasks across a possibly heterogeneous network of processing nodes, the NET-FFPF network monitoring architecture facilitates very high speed packet processing. Results show that NET-FFPF can perform complex processing at gigabit speeds. The proposed framework can be used to execute such diverse tasks as load balancing, traffic monitoring, firewalling and intrusion detection directly at the critical high-bandwidth links (e.g., in enterprise gateways).