A Review of High-Performance Programmable Data Plane Based on FPGA

The Programmable Data Plane (PDP) supports the offloading and acceleration of network applications, bringing revolutionary development opportunities to network applications. It also supports the rapid implementation and deployment of new protocols and services, promoting network innovation and evolution, making it a research hotspot in the network field in recent years. FPGA, due to its general computing architecture, rich on-chip resources, and expansion interfaces, provides various concrete implementations of programmable data planes, supporting a wider range of application scenarios. At the same time, FPGA also offers the possibility to explore more general programmable data plane abstractions. Therefore, FPGA-based programmable data planes (F-PDP) have received widespread attention in academia and industry. First, we categorize and elaborate on the FPGA-based programmable data plane abstractions. Next, we introduce the research progress of key technologies for rapidly building network applications based on F-PDP. Then, we present new programmable network devices based on F-PDP. Furthermore, we detail the application research achievements of F-PDP in enhancing network performance, building network measurement frameworks, and deploying network security applications in recent years. Finally, we discuss the potential future research trends of F-PDP.