Acceleration mechanism for high throughput and low latency in NFV environments

Abstract

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) brings agility and flexibility delivering network services with cost efficiency to network operators. As an emerging technology, it also presents several challenges, among them, ensuring high performance for virtualized network functions, based on software implementation and running on standard IT servers, instead of custom hardware appliances. In this article, we propose an acceleration mechanism for NFV platforms that allows the network traffic to bypass the service chain offloading the network functions. This mechanism can significantly improve performance and scalability, as demonstrated by the evaluation of our NFV platform, which is presented along with the details of the architecture and the implementation. The proposed solution using the proposed acceleration mechanism provided a performance boost of a factor of 23 compared to the same NFV platform without the acceleration mechanism enabled.