Dynamic Hardware-Acceleration of VNFs in NFV Environments

In this paper, we describe a scheme for dynamically provisioning hardware-accelerator resources to virtual network functions (VNF) in an NFV environment. The scheme involves collaboration between various NFV components like service-specific manager (SSM) and element-management-systems (EMSs) for the management of accelerator resources. Accelerator resources are dynamically allocated to VNFs based on their resource usage information. We present the performance comparison of non-accelerated and accelerated SSH-client VNFs. We also demonstrate switching of accelerator resources between the concurrently running SSH-tunnels which is triggered by a change in the nature of the data traffic flowing through SSHtunnels.