NFV acceleration with stateful NIC primitives

Current network data plane APIs for high-performance NICs only allow programmers to implement limited stateful algorithms. Applications such as congestion control, load balancing, etc., would benefit from a more powerful set of stateful primitives.

In this project we explore extensions to a data plane API to support the acceleration of Network Functions (NFs). We envision a new API that can transparently accelerate existing NFs, while providing at the same time further benefits to NFs that are aware, and explicitly make use, of the extended NIC’s features.