What kind of spark will NFV encounter when it encounters FPGA?
As the market continues to grow in demand for network services, the challenges facing operators are also increasing. For example, to meet the needs of customers for more devices, more video, and next-generation applications, but these all have extremely stringent requirements on latency and bandwidth. Demand continues to increase, network resources are exhausted, and operators are in a dilemma.
Operators need to control capital expenditure and operating expenditure while expanding system capacity and functions. In addition, they must also strengthen the improvement of network functions in order to reduce the cost of providing traditional network services and accelerate the progress of revenue-generating services.
Intel Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is built on a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) infrastructure, so it helps save costs when deployed. In addition, it can provide users with the resource flexibility they need, not only to help ensure higher utilization, but also to provide a higher level of programmability for various workloads. FPGAs can be used as additional programmable COTS components to achieve faster energy and cost savings, thereby further improving the performance and cost-effectiveness of virtualized systems.
Intel? FPGA can provide a wide range of high-bandwidth and low-latency functions through programming, which can significantly enhance the ability of the virtual network function (VNF) running on the operator's cloud platform.
The beginning of the creation of the virtual network world-"NFV+5G" At present, the fastest migration to implement NFV application is 5G telecommunications. The data rate of mobile devices may reach 10 Gbps, the geographic distribution of clients and services changes rapidly, local hot spots are densely distributed, it is not feasible to supply the entire urban network to deal with peak local workloads, and it is hoped that the early stage of 5G deployment will be capital investment and revenue generation. Matching, the interaction of these factors is conducive to building software-defined networks based on NFV rather than fixed-function hardware devices.
But which functions will be virtualized? NFV developers did not perform a top-down system analysis of the hypothetical 5G network to derive a set of core functions-a method of defining mathematics or application libraries, but adopted a more practical method. Their virtualization capabilities correspond to the devices and products that already existed in the network world before NFV. In this way, virtualized network function (VNF) developers can call their products temporary replacements for existing network software and hardware without having to present new concepts to system administrators, at least in the early days of the discussion.
Therefore, 5G service providers mainly provide functions critical to 4G LTE networks, including broadband network gateways, routers, IPsec functions, evolved packet core (EPC), and control plane processing that supports connection and resource management.
Some of these functions—especially control plane tasks—have been executed in software for a long time, so virtualization is just a matter of moving code from one execution environment to another. But other functions have always been implemented in dedicated hardware through ASICs or FPGAs, and more work must be done to convert to VNF.
One of the most prominent examples in most 5G NFV discussions is the Broadband Network Gateway (BNG). This device is located between the network client and the external Internet protocol network, which is actually a gateway between the baseband device of the cellular service provider and the public Internet. After careful study, BNG is not a single function, but a set of functions necessary to control the gateway. At its simplest, BNG provides address mapping between local addresses and Internet addresses, bidirectional packet routing, and control plane interface functions, and supports management and orchestration (MANO) modules to set up address mapping and routing tables.
In the full implementation process, BNG also includes session-level verification — an encryption task — and accounting, a certain level of security functions, and packet-level policy enforcement and service quality management (Figure 2). Routing usually only involves extracting address fields from packets, performing table queries, and forwarding packets to appropriate buffers, while accounting, security, policy, and quality of service require checking the payload of the packets, using regular expression processors, And fast, deep buffering to give priority to privileged packets.