Separating VNF and Network Control for Hardware‐Acceleration of SDN/NFV Architecture

摘要

A hardware‐acceleration architecture that separates virtual network functions ( VNF s) and network control (called HSN ) is proposed to solve the mismatch between the simple flow steering requirements and strong packet processing abilities of software‐defined networking ( SDN ) forwarding elements ( FE s) in SDN /network function virtualization ( NFV ) architecture, while improving the efficiency of NFV infrastructure and the performance of network‐intensive functions. HSN makes full use of FE s and accelerates VNF s through two mechanisms: (1) separation of traffic steering and packet processing in the FE s; (2) separation of SDN and NFV control in the FE s. Our HSN prototype, built on Net FPGA ‐10G, demonstrates that the processing performance can be greatly improved with only a small modification of the traditional SDN / NFV architecture.