Open, elastic provisioning of hardware acceleration in NFV environments

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is a new paradigm to move network tasks currently running on dedicated, vendor-specific hardware to elastic, virtualized environments, similar to IaaS cloud computing. A major challenge of NFV is to reach the performance known from dedicated hardware appliances...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in2015 International Conference and Workshops on Networked Systems (NetSys) pp. 1 - 5
Main Authors Nobach, Leonhard, Hausheer, David
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.03.2015
Subjects
Acceleration
Field programmable gate arrays
Hardware
Program processors
Virtual machine monitors
Virtualization
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is a new paradigm to move network tasks currently running on dedicated, vendor-specific hardware to elastic, virtualized environments, similar to IaaS cloud computing. A major challenge of NFV is to reach the performance known from dedicated hardware appliances, which often leverage ASIC, FPGA or NPU-based hardware acceleration to increase throughput and reduce delay. In this paper, a framework for elastic provisioning, programming and configuration of acceleration hardware for virtual network functions (VNFs) is proposed. Using this framework, VNFs can offload selected parts of their workload to heterogeneous acceleration processors, which may be shared among all VNF instances in the framework for improved resource utilization.
DOI:10.1109/NetSys.2015.7089057