Improving Multi-Tenant I/O-Acceleration for Containerized Network Function Environments
Timo Geier · 2024
Programmable, specialized chips are increasingly preferred over general-purpose CPUs because of their greater efficiency and flexibility. This trend extends to network infrastructures, where programmable devices transform the network into a distributed computing platform. This project aims to provide a framework for improving the performance of network functions by leveraging low-impact orchestration on acceleration hardware, such as programmable network switches. The focus lies on ensuring the isolation of network functions in the data plane, including tasks such as different validation checks for data plane and network function deployment code. The need for this solution was assessed. Based on this, a suitable architecture was designed, including a suitable manifest. Furthermore, an orchestrator based on this architecture is described and potential use cases (e.g. 5G/6G network integration) are discussed.