Network functions virtualization: the portability challenge

NFV is a paradigm shift in the telecom industry, where the functions traditionally hosted in purpose-built equipment become virtualized and run on pools of standard IT servers. NFV creates a twofold challenge for the telecom and IT industries: virtual appliances must deliver high performance while being portable across commodity servers. This article proposes an approach to address both requirements at the same time, relying on the notion of synthetic devices abstracting hardware-dependent acceleration functions.