On Efficient Packet Batching and Resource Allocation for GPU based NFV Acceleration

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has already become an essential technology for improving the scalability and flexibility of modern computer networks. The performance gap has become the main issue that impedes the development of NFV. GPUs, with massive parallel processors, are advocated to accelerate the Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs). However, the special architecture and workflow of GPUs introduce new challenges, especially on the batched processing, and resource allocation. In this paper, we propose GPU-based NFV Acceleration framework (GNFA) with an efficient packet batching and resource allocation solution. Considering the increased latency caused by the accumulation of the GPU kernel invoking overhead, we first invent a latency reduction mechanism called SM Performance Compensation (SPC). A Partition and Adjustment based Batching and Resource Allocation (PABARA) algorithm that jointly considers batch size tuning and GPU thread allocation is also proposed. We have practically implemented GNFA and extensively evaluated its performance on some well-known VNFs. The experiment results show that GNFA can effectively promote the GPU resource utilization and improve the NFV performance in terms of per-packet latency.