Modular VNF Components Acceleration With FPGA Overlays

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is a novel paradigm that aims to minimize operational and capital expenditures, by decoupling network functions from dedicated hardware and implementing them as Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) instead. However, to fulfill such expectations, VNFs must be implemented efficiently, offering high performance and energy efficiency, which is not always feasible on General-Purpose Processors (GPPs). Thus, the use of reconfigurable accelerators, typically based on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), has been proposed to offer higher efficiency whilst not forsaking the flexibility that is the core of the NFV paradigm. Not all VNFs or even VNF Components (VNFCs), however, are suitable for FPGA acceleration. This leads to new challenges related to identifying those VNFCs that should be deployed in FPGAs, maximizing the reuse of developed FPGA accelerators, and managing this heterogeneous infrastructure. To address these challenges, in this paper we present an enhanced design of VNFAccel, a platform to manage VNFCs in heterogeneous NFV infrastructures. We evaluate the performance and energy efficiency of the implemented functions in comparison to GPP-based solutions, showing that, when properly used, FPGAs can provide relevant benefits while maintaining the flexibility and reuse potential envisioned for NFV.