Genetic algorithm-based automated task allocation technique for network processors

A problem that must be faced when designing systems based on network processors (NPs) is how to assign the packet-processing tasks to the processor pipeline consisting of many processing engines. Nowadays, this work is done by developers manually, which is error-prone and has low efficiency. To alleviate this, this paper proposes a genetic algorithm-based method to assign processing tasks to processing engines automatically. In essence, this is a multi-objective searching problem, thus the introduction of genetic algorithm is reasonable. Experiments show that this method can quickly obtain near-optimal solutions from the large solution space. Using this technique, the assignment of task to PE can be fulfilled easily and efficiently. Thus, the development period can be shortened greatly.