This document discusses the importance of coherence protocols with network applications on multicore processors. As network speeds and complexity increase, future network processors will need to provide both high performance and high programmability. Single processors will not be sufficient to support future demands, so multicore processors that can exploit parallelism in network workloads will be needed instead. The paper focuses on cache coherence protocols, which are central to multicore network processor design. Simulation results show that token protocols have significantly higher performance than directory protocols for network workloads on multicore processors, with an average 4x improvement with an 8-core configuration.