Design Of The FcoE Protocol Offloading Engine Based On AXI4-stream Interface And Its Verification On The Adapter

FCoE is a promising network convergence technology for simplifying the data center management and reducing energy consumption. Traditionally, offloading the FCoE protocol by software protocol stackexcessively occupies CPU which limits the usage of CPU resources for other network service applications. This cannot meet the high performance demand. In order to decrease the load of CPU and improve the performance of entire network, an auxiliary protocol offload method is required to partially accomplishthe protocol offloading.In this thesis, a protocol offloading engine is designed and implemented by hardware based on FPGA chip. Through comprehensively studying FCoE related protocol standards of converged network, the process of FCoE protocol stack is analyzed, and the features of Host Bus Adapter and Network Interface Card is investigated by referencing the offloading methods of TCP/IP. The hardware design of this engine is described using Verilog language considering the adopted FPGA chip. The modules of the engine are simulated via the Xilinx ISim. The entire engine is encapsulated into an IP after passing the simulation verification. Afterwards, the FCoE adapter environment is set up on ML605 evaluation board, the protocol offloading engine is added into a system on a programmable chip(SoPC) which simulates the adapter environment and the systematic verification is done by using protocol analyzer.The designed engine supports AXI4-Stream, AXI4 and AXI4-Lite interfaces. It has 8 parallel transmitting and receiving queues, supporting priority-based flow control(PFC), enhanced transmission selection(ETS), receiving of FCoE jumbo frames, effective cyclic redundancy check(CRC), as well as programmable configuration. It can meet the bandwidth requirement of 10 Gbps Ethernet and coordinate with the protocol stack very well. In this design, the scalability of the functionalities is considered. The engine can be applied into the chip of FCoE converged network adapter, which has great potential of commercialization.