Framework for Live Migration of FPGA based ECB-mode AES-128 accelerator

Virtual Machines in cloud datacenters are live migrated for assuring service availability in the event of errors and maintenance. FPGA based hardware accelerators must also be live migrated for the same reasons. AES is widely accepted encryption standard and is therefore commonly used for security provision. In this paper, we propose a novel live migration technique for migration of FPGA accelerated ECB mode AES-128 encryption algorithm using the concept of pipelining which gracefully migrates the application to the destination. The proposed methodology is explained with the help of outer-round only pipelined design of AES-128. Experiments show that the proposed method can reduce downtime nearly to zero, ensuring the service’s availability at maximum.