Network Implementation with TCP Protocol : A server on FPGA handling multiple connections

Abstract: The growing number of players in Massively Multiplayer Online games puts a heavy load on the network infrastructure and the general-purpose CPU of the game servers. A game server’s network stack processing needs equal treatment to the game-related processing ability. It is a fact that the networkcommunication tasks on the CPU reach the same order of magnitude as the game-related tasks, and the computing capability of the CPU can be a factor that limits the maximum number of players. Therefore, CPU offloading is becoming vital. FPGAs play an essential role in dedicated computation and network communication due to their superiority in flexibility and computation-oriented efficiency. Thus, an FPGA can be a good hardware platform to implement a network stack to replace the CPU in processing the network computations. However, most commercial and open-source network stack IPs support only one or few connections. This thesis project explores a network server on FPGA, implemented in RTL, that can handle multiple connections, specialized in the TCP protocol. The design in this project adds a cached memory hierarchy that provides a filter against port numbers of multiple connections from the same application and an Application Layer Controller, based on an open-source Ethernet, to increase the number of TCP connections further. A proof of concept was built, and its performance was tested. As a result, the TCP server on the FPGA was designed to handle a maximum of 40 configurable connections, but only 25 connections could be maintained during operation due to operational latency constraints. This FPGA server solution provides a latency of 1 ms in LAN. The babbling idiot and out-of-order packet transfer tests from clientswere also performed to guarantee robustness. During testing, poor performance in Packet Loss and Packet Error Handling was noted. In the future, this issue needs to be addressed. In addition, further investigations of methods for expanding the cache need to be done to allow handling more clients.