The Internet has been successful at providing global connectivity to end-systems, but is lacking greatly in terms of security, quality-of-service, and manageability. For performance reasons, network routers have been build with high-performance but fixed functionality in the data path. In order to provide the ability to change, improve, and add to the packet processing functions on a network device, programmability in the data path is necessary. Network processors provide such capabilities and present an ideal vehicle for experimenting with new network protocols and capabilities.

In our current work, we are exploring how network processors can be used to improve distributed network measurement capabilities on high-speed links and how to use network processor to perform TCP processing on a network node.

A recently started projects aims at developing novel end-to-end abstractions for next-generation Internet architectures.