L7-filter is a widely used traffic classification system which relies on regular expression matching based deep packet inspect method and can identify network traffic by inspecting string patterns hidden in the packet payload.However

due to considerable computation and storage expenditures

existing L7-filter software and hardware solutions could not offer sufficient performance in the context of 40 Gbps and higher speed networks.Based on analysis of common features of the L7-filter protocol patterns

this paper proposes a hardware-accelerated method which is for achieving high performance and includes customized data structure

optimization and matching architecture.To validate the proposed method

a hardware prototype on Virtex 6 FPGA card is implemented and tested.Experimental results show that the prototype can scan network traffic at a typical rate of about 115Gbps.