Bidirectional packet flow transformation

#The present application is related to the following commonly assigned patent applications: U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/325,553, entitled “COMPACTED BINARY IDENTIFIER GENERATION” by Claude Basso et al.; and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/325,597, entitled “ANALYSIS OF NETWORK PACKETS USING A GENERATED HASH CODE” by Claude Basso et al., all of which were filed on even data herewith and are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety for all purposes.

#This application claims priority to European Patent Application No. EP10306403, entitled “BISECTIONAL PACKET FLOW TRANSFORMATION,” filed Dec. 14, 2010, the disclosure of which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.

#1. Field

#The present invention is illustrated by way of example and is not intended to be limited by the accompanying figures, in which like references indicate similar elements. Elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale.

#FIG. 1 is a diagram of a relevant portion an exemplary network architecture for a network processor that implements a hasher configured according to the present disclosure;

#FIG. 2 is a diagram of a relevant portion of an exemplary hasher employed in the network architecture of FIG. 1;

#As will be appreciated by one of ordinary skill in the art, the present invention may be embodied as a method, system, device, or computer program product. Accordingly, the present invention may take the form of an embodiment including hardware, an embodiment including software (including firmware, resident software, microcode, etc.) or an embodiment combining software and hardware aspects that may all generally be referred to herein as a circuit, module, or system. The present invention may, for example, take the form of a computer program product on a computer-usable storage medium having computer-usable program code, e.g., in the form of one or more design files, embodied in the medium.

#Any suitable computer-usable or computer-readable storage medium may be utilized. The computer-usable or computer-readable storage medium may be, for example, but is not limited to, an electronic, magnetic, optical, electromagnetic, infrared, or semiconductor system, apparatus, or device. More specific examples (a non-exhaustive list) of the computer-readable storage medium include: a portable computer diskette, a hard disk, a random access memory (RAM), a read-only memory (ROM), an erasable programmable read-only memory (EPROM) or flash memory, a portable compact disc read-only memory (CD-ROM), an optical storage device, or a magnetic storage device. As used herein the term “coupled” includes a direct electrical connection between elements or blocks and an indirect electrical connection between elements or blocks achieved using one or more intervening elements or blocks.

#According to the present disclosure, generation of identical resulting keys (in which some or all pairs of fields are made bitwise symmetric) is employed such that swapping of bits in the fields of input keys leads to the same resulting output keys. In this manner, bidirectional flows are associated when destination and source field pairs (e.g., address or port fields) are interchanged.