Approche générative conjointe logicielle-matérielle au développement du support protocolaire d’applications réseaux

摘要

Communications between network applications is achieved by using rulesets known as protocols. Protocol messages are managed by the application layer known as the protocol parsing layer or protocol handling layer. Protocol parsers are coded in software, in hardware or based on a co-design approach. They represent the interface between the application logic and the outside world. Thus, they are critical components of network applications. Global performances of network applications are directly linked to the performances of their protocol parser layers.Developping protocol parsers consists of translating protocol specifications, written in a high level language such as ABNF towards low level software or hardware code. As the use of embedded systems is growing, hardware ressources become more and more available to applications on systems on chip (SoC). Nonetheless, developping a network application that uses hardware ressources is challenging, requiring not only expertise in hardware design, but also a knowledge of the protocols involved and an understanding of low-level network programming.This thesis proposes a generative hardware-software co-design based approach to the developpement of network protocol message parsers, to improve their performances without increasing the expertise the developper may need. Our approach is based on a dedicated language, called Zebra, that generates both hardware and software elements that compose protocol parsers. The necessary expertise is deported in the use of the Zebra language and the generated hardware components permit to improve global performances.The contributions of this thesis are as follows : We provide an analysis of network protocols and applications. This analysis allows us to detect the elements which performances can be improved using hardware ressources. We present the domain specific language Zebra to describe protocol handling layers. Software and hardware components are then generated according to Zebra specifications. We have built a SoC running a Linux operating system to assess our approach.We have designed hardware accelerators for different network protocols that are deployed and driven by applications. To increase sharing of parsing units between several tasks, we have developped a middleware that seamlessly manages all the accesses to the hardware components. The Zebra middleware allows several clients to access the ressources of a hardware accelerator. We have conducted several set of experiments in real conditions. We have compared the performances of our approach with the performances of well-knownprotocol handling layers. We observe that protocol handling layers baded on our approach are more efficient that existing approaches.