Many MPU applications can benefit from specialized hardware processing for [[Hardware acceleration|acceleration]] functions for common tasks in packet processing:
* [[traffic management]], such as class-[[Class of- service]] [[Queue (data structure)|queues]] with [[Congestion control|congestion controls]] like [[Tail drop|tail-drop]] and [[random early detection]]
* scheduling[[Scheduling algorithmsalgorithm]]s such as [[Priority queue|strict- priority] and [[weighted fair queueing]]
* [[Computer security|Security]] functions including: bulk encryption and decryption, random number generation, packet authentication hash computation
* packetPacket [[parsing]] and inspection algorithms
* regular[[Regular expression]] processing
* compression[[Compression]] and decompression, necessary for inspection of compressed data
* fastFast interfaces to external search devices such as [[content addressable memory|ternary content addressable memories]], deep packet [[parsers]], [[longest prefix match]] engines etc.
