5G has challenging performance requirements which will require some VNFs to utilize hardware optimization. For example, a VNF may utilize SR-IOV and DPDK to bypass the Linux IP stack and minimize latency.
In order to support this it will be necessary to model and orchestrate VNF requirements and compute host support for attributes such as:
- Real-time kernel and hypervisor
- Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV)
- CPU Pinning
- NUMA Awareness
- Huge Pages
- PCIe Passthrough (Example: GPUs, FPGA etc..)
- Resource Director Technology (DDR bandwidth allocation, Cache size allocation etc..)
- Accelerated virtual switch using Data Plan Development Kit (DPDK)
- Accelerated virtual switch using smartNIC
- Cryptography accelerators such as AES-NI, SIMD/AVX, QAT
- Random Data Generation using native instructions such as RDRAND
- Compression Accelerators such as QAT
- Data Plane VNF acceleration
- Security features such as TPM, SGX
- Hardened Kernel and Hypervisor
Project | Impact |
---|---|
SDC | Support modeling EPA attributes. |
Policy | Support definition of homing policies based on EPA attributes. |
APPC | Support configuration of EPA settings.
|
SO | Support additional HEAT features. If SO calls MULTICLOUD for VNF/VNFC instantiation, then it needs to similar job what APPC is expected to do. That is, it needs to get hold of DC region and workload flavor information from OF and pass same to MULTICLOUD as part of instantiation API. |
MULTICLOUD |
|
A&AI | Support EPA attributes.
|
OF |
|