A SDN Solution for System-On-Chip World
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2018 Fifth International Conference on Software Defined Systems (SDS) A SDN Solution for System-on-Chip World Soultana Ellinidou∗z, Gaurav Sharmayz, Jean-Michel Dricot∗z and Olivier Markowitchyz ∗Wireless Communications Group – OPERA Department y QualSec Group – Computer Science Department zCyber Security Research Center Universite´ Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium fsoultana.ellinidou, gsharma, jdricot, [email protected] Abstract—System on chips (SoCs) are all around us in today’s different processing requirements such as performance, power, world. Therefore, in this paper we propose a flexible, technology- reliability and response time due to the fact that most of them aware SoC design, named as Cloud-of-Chips (CoC), which is able are designed for specific applications. The need of a versatile to change its characteristics, such as routing logic, transmission paths, priorities, IC clustering, etc. We focus particularly on architecture, supporting a wide variety of applications (such inside communication of CoC architecture. The basic idea of CoC as Internet of Things), leads to the design of an extremely is the creation of an architecture, which will be able to support configurable system both at design time and at run time. all the requirements of a vast number of todays applications by The CoC refers to a large amount of interconnected ICs adopting and changing its characteristics according to them. The (Integrated Circuits) and IC cores, which can have differ- valorization perspectives are of importance since the outcomes of this research will be applicable for embedded systems, real- ent communication speeds and hierarchy levels. One of the time systems, communication systems, as well as for mainstream key challenges in the CoC paradigm is the communication systems such as Internet-of-Things and Internet-of-Everything. between the clusters of cores and ICs. For that reason an As far as the inside communication of our CoC platform is interesting approach could be to adopt the algorithms and concerned, we leverage on algorithms and strategies developed strategies developed within the field of SDN. SDN emerged within the field of Software Defined Networking (SDN), which was introduced to deal with hardware redesign and ultimately to support the dynamic nature of future network functions provide cloud-like flexibility. At the end, we describe registration and intelligent applications while lowering operating costs and authentication of every entity in our network. through simplified hardware, software and management [12]. Index Terms—SDN, SoC, P2P communication, ID-based Cryp- The approach proposed by the SDN paradigm is that the data tosystem travels across multiple nodes of the network and efficient and effective data transfer is supported by a centralized controller. I. INTRODUCTION The forwarding decisions are done first in the controller and The rise of new computing paradigms such as Internet- then moved down to the overseen switches which simply ex- of-Things (IoT) and Internet-of-Everything (IoE) (billions of ecute these decisions. In the SDN paradigm, switches provide devices foreseen in 2020) requires extremely versatile IC vendor-agnostic protocols for remote controllers, one of the (Integrated Circuit) solutions. The IoT and the IoE have been most common communication protocol is OpenFlow [7]. This proposed as the next revolution of digital systems application protocol provides to the controllers a way to discover the [2]. However IoT/IoE paradigms will bring a wide variety of OpenFlow-compatible switches, defines the matching rules for applications, with highly variable volumes, for which tradi- the switching hardware and collects statistics from switching tional System-on-Chips (SoCs) are not capable of supporting devices. them. As far as the communication over the CoC is concerned, A SoC is an integrated circuit that integrates all components SDN turns the embedded system susceptible to security of an electronic system [6]. The SoCs provide the designers breaches. Among others, cryptographic protocols and schemes an opportunity to optimise the system design metrics, such as: aim at proving confidentiality and integrity of exchanged infor- performance, cost, size, power, and run-time. On a SoC, it is mation. Specifically, as far as the inside CoC communication, important to efficiently and optimally address the application the fact that we have Point to Point (P2P) communication lead requirements with respect to the system components. Further- us to use identity-based cryptography to assist in the security more the SoCs provide scalability and higher throughput for and performance critical assignment of user identities in P2P heterogeneous multi-core systems. systems. Network-on-chip (NoC) is a scalable solution to address The rest of the paper is organised as follows: In Section II, communication problems for Multi-Processor Systems-on- we refer to the related work about SoC platforms and the Chips (MPSoC). NoC was introduced in order to scale down main challenges about proposed approach. In Section III, we the concepts of computer networks, and be adaptable directly introduce our three-levels architecture: Printed Circuit Board on the design process of a multi-core integrated circuits. (PCB) Level, IC Level, Processing Cluster (PC) Level. In As of today, general designs of SoC platforms for multi-core Section IV, we analyse the networking aspects of our platform Network-on-Chip (NoC) are usually not capable of supporting introducing a new communication protocol called SoC-Flow. 1 978-1-5386-5899-4/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE 2018 Fifth International Conference on Software Defined Systems (SDS) In Section V we describe the security aspects of our platform focused on abstraction layers and interfaces that permit its and it follows, the conclusion and future work in the last deployment in a modular fashion and it has the potential Section. to overcome the NoC management problems in the many- Core era. However the authors propose an architecture without II. RELATED WORK providing enough details about the security aspects or the A number of architectures and implementations for SoC communication protocols. Another interesting contribution of platforms is presented in literature. Nomadik is a SoC platform the same authors is presented on [10], where they evaluate the aims to provide video-coding algorithms and chip implemen- SDNoC architecture among the Processing Elements(PEs) in tation schemes for the mobile industry [1]. Another interested a many-Core system with System C simulator, focusing on the architecture presented on OMAP-2 platform, derives from configuration time, delay, and throughput of their architecture. the TI OMAP architecture, which is designed to address mobile entertainment and communications such as all-in-one III. OUR ARCHITECTURE smartphones or converged portable multimedia devices [8], The CoC architecture consists of an embedded SoC con- [5]. Moreover, the PNX8550 (Viper2) set-top box SoC, based nected with soft-multicore processors with the purpose of on the Philips Nexperia platform [6], is a highly integrated creating an MPSoC of many-cores imported on PCB. In multimedia SOC targeted at advanced set-top box available on order to design a heterogeneous system architecture, High the market. Last but not least, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Performance (HP) cores and Low Performance (LP) cores will (Amazon EC2) [11] is a web service that provides secure, be chosen to present the different perspectives. Specifically the resizable computing capacity in the cloud. Amazon EC2 is a different cores categorized according to their performance into programmable instance with Field Programmable Gate Arrays Processing Clusters (PCs). Our CoC platform is comprised of a (FPGAs) that creates custom hardware accelerations for your PCB of ICs where each IC contains scalable PCs of Cores [Fig. applications. 1]. For the communication on a PCB, on-board SDN switches The [1] and [8] focus on the mobile and smart phone are placed on the boundaries of all ICs, in order to provide industry. However, the design in [6] is pertaining to set-top quick communication among the ICs and corresponding PCs. boxes SoC. The last platform, that is presented, is a new tool In order to provide communication among the PCs, hardware available from Amazon able to customize FPGAs for hardware switches with SDN functionalities are adopted. Specifically, acceleration. They are all heterogeneous multi-processor plat- a SDN switch consists of Data Plane, which carries packet forms and they use a central Reduced Instruction Set Computer traffic and Control Plane, which handles the communication (RISC) host processor to control the system: a MIPS for Viper- between switches and controllers. The network as a whole II and ARM processors for the OMAP-2 and Nomadik. As far will follow a mesh topology where the path of each packet is as the inside communication of platforms, they use different dynamically mapped. As far as the controller we are planing approaches, however there are some notable similarities. All to include one controller ion IC level, running on a dedicated systems depart from the classic shared-bus architecture and PC and one central controller on PCB level, in order to carry use forms of interconnects that can be assimilated to partial the traffic between ICs. cross-bars. The AMBA multi-layer of the Nomadik is one Our work is to create an automated framework which of the most known and used forms of a partial cross-bar. provides a wrapping