Network Processors: Architectures, Protocols and Platforms (Telecom Engineering) [Hardcover]

I read 'Network Processors' to learn more about this relatively new technology that is changing the way network security appliances are designed and deployed. Panos Lekkas' work seemed like the only book available that presented a broad, multi-vendor sweep of the network processor landscape. While the book has plenty of information to offer, I found it did not really live up to my expectations.

Network processors are specialized computing chips built for high performance packet processing applications. I hoped 'Network Processors' would spend a good amount of time making the case for this technology, explaining why NPs are indispensable compared to general purpose CPUs. Unfortunately, I felt the book did not make a compelling case. Chapter 2, titled 'Network Processors: Justification,' is only 10 pages, with a single chart graphing bandwidth demand vs time. I would have liked to see head-to-head comparisons of NPs against CPUs for various network applications. The book spends a lot of time discussing technologies and concepts at the periphery of NPs; I think some of that space could have been put to better use.

Here is an example of why I felt let down by this book. In the preface, the author seems to assure the reader that he will answer questions others tend to ignore. On p. xix the author writes 'In numerous industry discussions, I have encountered experienced software engineers who have implemented cutting-edge protocols, but have no idea what concepts such as scheduling, backpressure, switching fabrics, and classification mean.' To be fair, the author does explain switching fabrics and classification. However, he says almost nothing about backpressure, and he certainly never explicitly defines it; the only mention is on p. 274.

Elsewhere, I thought the book was unnecessarily confusing. It's fine to cover deep technical details, but it helps to start with clear general definitions and progress to more difficult material. The following excerpt from p. 220, the second page of chapter 12, serves as part of the 'introduction' to content addressable memory: 'The principle of associative memory is based on the inverse mechanism of establishing a relationship between the input and a specific piece of information stored in the memory array.' This sentence is fine if the reader knows what 'associative memory' is, understands the 'inverse mechanism,' and can relate to 'the input' and a 'memory array.'

The layout of the book itself may have contributed to my difficulty with it. The font is one of the smallest I have ever encountered. The footnotes are so small as to be almost illegible. I like the hardcover binding, though.

Although not the author's fault, readers should be aware that many of the companies and some of the technologies in 'Network Processors' have disappeared. Each time I encountered a new company or product I checked to see if their Web page or product line still existed. For example, IBM's PowerNP receives an entire chapter; it was sold to Hifn in January 2004. In many cases, however, surviving vendors have not brought too many products to market since the book's late 2002 publication date.

I believe a second edition of 'Network Processors' would benefit from an editor who challenges the author to be more organized and generous with his audience. The book was built on a good idea -- bringing knowledge of NPs to general readers. A second edition should ensure that goal is met, since we do need to know more about this promising technology.

Every reader buys a book with different expectations and therefore I respect the points made by several other reviewers. For me however, this is one of the best books I've come across in the last decade. I've written two books myself and so I can be reasonably critical. At the same time, everyone has their unique preferences. For mine, this book is tremendous. The author clearly poured his heart into it-- it is one of the most comprehensive books on any subject I've come across. Several things make this book unique. First, the author provides his real perspectives and true opinions on network processors, vendors, approaches, what works, and what doesn't. His years of experience are reflected in the book. He also comments on the industry. He does these things without any pretense of political correctness-- he says it like he sees it. You'll also find him providing his views on deeper technical subjects. He's also perfectly happy to provide those views without giving you a treatise on everyone of the topics he comments on. I like that. He clearly set his sights on giving you as much information as he could in one book. Others may prefer more of a straight textbook like buildup of the material with no change from that theme and coverage only of topics that are built-up from scratch. There is however a large amount of buildup in the book, I just didn't buy it strictly for that. The book covers so much ground that in the 400+ pages the publisher had to reduce the font to keep the book size down. The book not only comments on particular example vendor implementations but also looks at architectural topics. He for example talks about the issues associated with software development environments and the economic tradeoffs an NPU vendor makes in investing in sample code versus a true software development environment. He covers deeper topics such as classification and also includes a chapter on security processors.

Knowing traditional CPU architectures and their limitations and being confronted with the need to understand how one can tackle numerous network communication protocols in real time under gigabits per seconds data rates, I picked up this book as the only one (to my knowledge) available, which did not seem devoted to esoteric & narrow research of issues. It seemed like a book, which would explain to me the whole landscape of what is needed to make fast equipment work, in other words the big picture. I was completely and positively astounded at the sheer breadth and depth of information that this book conveys. Maybe a better title should be "network processing chips" as it discusses much more than network processors and rigthfully so. The book covers all the necessary components one needs to put together next to a network processor as a big jigsaw puzzle in order to build a powerful working system, e.g. things like switch fabrics, traffic managers, content addressable memory, security coprocessors, etc. The style is flowing and engaging and the structure is very modular so one can go back and forth delving into one's areas of interest. The book can be read either from cover to cover or as a reference. Its binding makes the book even more of a pleasure to use. One must of course be able to understand some basics in order to be able to grasp the content as it may not be "bedtime" reading for some readers; it is fair however to say that after reading it one should have an infinitely better appreciation of how fast routers, wireless switches, etc. have to be logically structured and designed in order to be able to handle all of the quality-of-service-sensitive multimedia traffic they are more and more seeing. A couple of the many companies whose innovative platforms are discussed, have been either acquired or gone out of business for lack of funds during the last couple of years, something not surprising as the market for network processing chips is growing while still getting consolidated. The technology fundamentals however are crystal clear and unalterable. The overall subject is truly vast and each chapter could very well be a book by itself. Nevertheless in my opinion, the author did an excellent job in capturing the overall landscape and in laying out the fundamentals in a fresh way that not only is not intimidating but also makes sense especially for a newcomer. From here one can expand into any direction one wants while being fluent with the terms used in this field. If you want to understand this new area of advanced networking hardware and architecture internals and maybe catch your networking vendor's salesforce a bit off guard, you have simply got to buy this book.