Evaluation of approaches for hardware-accelerated and - offloaded VNFs in telco applications

For telco providers the shift of their network functions from proprietary hardware to software driven commercial off-the-shelf hardware is inevitable. Especially for telecommunication purposes, the QoS requirements of a VNF, as low latency and resilience, are very strict and do often not comply with the performance restrictions of a standard server CPU.

Therefore, this project investigates various approaches to offload or accelerate VNFs in hardware of a SmartNIC in a telco environment and evaluates the approaches regarding performance metrics as CPU utilization and added delay.