Accelerating Flow Processing Middleboxes With Programmable Nics

Software network functions are increasingly popular as they promise operational flexibility unconstrained by physical limitations. However, meeting the stringent requirements of high throughput and low latency in modern networks is often challenging on commodity hardware as network bandwidth is upgraded to 10s of Gbps and the number of concurrent flows grows.To address the problem, we explore the potential of harnessing modern programmable network interface cards (NICs) to dynamically offload stateful operations of network functions. We identify a set of candidate operations that can be offloaded to programmable NICs, and gauge the expected benefits in terms of CPU load reduction and throughput and latency improvement. We also consider challenges in offloading stateful operations to programmable NICs.