Abstract
Because of the more and more popularity of Internet, more and more new services and applications are created to meet the user's requirements. In order to speed up the ser- vice processing, many of the network manufactures like to implement such network services into Hardware ASIC to enhance the performance. But it takes a very long time to design an ASIC so that the speed of development time could not meet the requirement of the demands of new services, and cost is still an important issue as well. That's why we need Network Pro- cessor, a brand new concept to solve these probelms. The main idea of NP is to design a programmable processor that is able to process the network information case by case according to the micro code inside. By the help of micro code,the enter- prises could save the development time. Because NP is programm- able and even in case modification is necessary, all you have to do is downloading a new image code into NP instead of making another new hardware instance. The whole hardware architecture could remain unchanged. It goes without saying that user could develope any kind of network applications on their own demand under the NP architecture. Still the same, in most case the only thing needed to do is putting a new image code into the NP. Although there are several companies making good NPs, but the prefect NP is still not available and the system perfor- mance will be bounded by NP design. Let's take the NP we choosed as an example, it will have the same problem named 'head of line blocking' with the common Crossbar Switch because of its hardware design. In order to solve that problem, we've designed a Virtual Input Queue(VIQ) as a solution. Another pro- blem is that there is only one output queue inside the NP, and it could be happened to lost packets in burst condition. So that we design the Dynamic Output Queue (DOQ) to solve this problem. Finally we designed several test cases for analyzing accor- ding to the above architecture, and we've proved that the NP could raise its performance by the help of VIQ and DOQ.