VirtualStack: Green High Performance Network Protocol Processing Leveraging FPGAs

In times of cloud services and IoT, network protocol processing is a big part of the CPU utilization today. Foong et al. proposed the rule of thumb for TCP, that a single-core CPU needs about 1 Hz clock frequency to produce 1 bit/s worth of TCP data packets. Unfortunately, CPU speed has stagnated around 5 GHz in recent years resulting in a upper limit of 5 GBit/s throughput with single-threaded network processing. Further, CPUs featuring such high clock rates (e.g., Intel Core i7-8086K) have rated TDP around 95 W, resulting in very high power consumption for high throughput situations. Meanwhile, industry offers some hardware acceleration for TCP as part of their server network cards, to relief the server CPUs and increase the energy efficiency. However this is just a small support as state and management still needs the CPU of the host system. In this paper, we present an approach based on field pro- grammable gate arrays (FPGA) to not only free up CPU cycles but provide a scaleable and energy efficient concept to fully utilize high-speed network interfaces, while maintaining the flexibility of software solutions. For our evaluation, we utilized the NetFPGA Sume, proofing to achieve the linerate of connected SFP+ ports while power consumption stays below 6 W. By leveraging network protocol virtualization, the hardware acceleration approach is not only deployable but stays flexible enough to adapt new networking paradigms quickly.