NFV Acceleration: The Role of the NIC

Network function virtualization necessitates hardware acceleration to achieve high performance at today’s soaring network rates. Existing architectures are burdened by common tasks that are already implemented by modern NICs, such as virtualization support and flow steering. We propose a new NFV acceleration system design that uses direct communication between the NIC and the accelerator and places many of these common tasks on the NIC, thus leaving the accelerator to focus on its intended application.