High performance multi-engine regular expression processing

Abstract

This paper discusses a novel multi-engine hardware based regular expression processor. Regular expression is widely used as a pattern matching technique to detect presence of malicious content in Internet traffic. In the proposed approach, parallel IP flows are handled by separate regular expression processing engines, sharing a common program memory. The proposed architecture has been designed and implemented for a four engine system using Altera Stratix IV technology. With four independent engines operating at 185.43 MHz the achievable system bandwidth is estimated to be 5.93 Gbps, using approximately 20K ALUTs.