Hardware Acceleration of Virtualized Network Functions: Offloading to SmartNICs and ASIC1 Work on this paper was funded by the Celtic Plus project SEND-ATE-Planets [4]

The virtualization of network functions has been proposed and gradually introduced into telecommunication networks since 2012. While the promise of NFV was the transfer of established functions from proprietary hardware to commodity servers as well as a harmonization of network management, little of this can be seen in today's networks. The reason for the slow adoption of NFV in real networks is first and foremost the tradeoff between commoditization and performance. In other words, just where I/O speed is of utmost importance, NFV has its weakest point. With the advent of programmable network devices like SmartNICs and whitebox switches the achievable performance increases dramatically. However, offloading of packet processing to hardware outside of the VM or container requires a control channel between the virtualized network function (VNF) and the network accelerator. The paper discusses options for this and introduces baseboxd, an Open Source SDN controller that uses the Linux kernel's tools to offload packet processing. Using baseboxd, a plethora of existing Open Source projects can be re-used and no “SDN controller apps” have to be written, as all networking relies on the Linux kernel.