Event Details

Seminar DCSY - Oeldemann, A.: Hardware Support for Resource-Efficient Execution of Virtualized Network Functions

SUPSY

Place
L314, CZ
Organiser
Type
seminar
Access
free
URL
Description

TUM's Chair of Integrated Systems has a decade-long experience in building Systems-on-Chip for networking and other application domains. In this talk, I will give a brief overview of our previous projects in the networking domain (FlexPath, 100-GET, ...) and will then move on to present our current research activities targeting the resource-efficient execution of virtualized network functions. By moving network functions (e.g., routing, intrusion-detection, VPN) from specialized hardware appliances to software, multiple network functions can be scheduled on the same server to increase resource utilization. However, the large spread in per-packet processing complexity combined with bursty data center traffic patterns result in high processing demand variations on milli- and microsecond timescales. To perform an efficient provisioning of hardware resources for such variable workloads while still maintaining Quality-of-Service, I will present our work on a hardware-supported Load Management Layer for Network Function Virtualization. The Load Management Layer (LML) is integrated in the network adapter and redirects network traffic to neighboring servers if local resources become overloaded. By combining several LML-enabled servers in a cluster, our simulations show that resource savings due to sharing effects can become as high as 24%. In contrast to conventional load balancers, the LML is closely coupled with each local server and thus benefits from time-accurate insight into the current resource load. Finally, I will conclude my presentation with a brief introduction of our open-source FPGA-based network tester, which we are using to assess the implementation of our research concepts.

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