Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) has received considerable attention in the past few years, both from industry and academia, due to its potential for reducing capital and operational expenditures, thus enabling faster innovation in networks. NFV proposes decoupling network functions from fixed hardware platforms and implementing them as virtual machines on off-the-shelf servers. Although potentially able to provide the mentioned benefits, software-based implementations of compute-intensive network functions still struggle to perform at the desired speed, especially when requiring line-rate processing for ever-faster communication links. To address this, hardware acceleration can be used to improve the throughput and latency of virtualized network functions (VNFs). In order to provide the advantages foreseen for NFV, however, such accelerators cannot be fixed and application-specific hardware, since they need to cope with new VNFs as well as fluctuations in demand. In this context, Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are particularly suitable, since they are able to provide high-performance implementations of network functions and they are completely reprogrammable, thereby being able to implement different VNFs even after deployment. There have been many recent efforts to enable the use of FPGAs in the NFV context, including efficient implementations of network functions on FPGAs, platforms to manage the integration and coexistence of multiple VNFs on an FPGA, and high-level synthesis tools especially tailored to ease the programming of VNFs for FPGAs. In this work we survey previous work covering these aspects, and discuss the main open research challenges that must be addressed before FPGA adoption in NFV infrastructures becomes effectively seamless and efficient.

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关于 FPGA 支持虚拟化网络功能的可行执行的调查

网络功能虚拟化 (NFV) 在过去几年中受到了工业界和学术界的广泛关注，因为它具有减少资本和运营支出的潜力，从而实现更快的网络创新。NFV 建议将网络功能与固定硬件平台解耦，并将其作为现成服务器上的虚拟机实现。尽管可能能够提供上述好处，但计算密集型网络功能的基于软件的实现仍然难以以所需的速度执行，尤其是在需要线速处理以实现更快的通信链接时。为了解决这个问题，可以使用硬件加速来提高虚拟化网络功能 (VNF) 的吞吐量和延迟。然而，为了提供 NFV 所预见的优势，这种加速器不能是固定的和特定于应用程序的硬件，因为它们需要应对新的 VNF 以及需求的波动。在这种情况下，现场可编程门阵列 (FPGA) 特别合适，因为它们能够提供网络功能的高性能实现，并且完全可重新编程，因此即使在部署后也能实现不同的 VNF。最近有许多努力使 FPGA 能够在 NFV 环境中使用，包括在 FPGA 上高效实现网络功能、管理 FPGA 上多个 VNF 的集成和共存的平台，以及专门为简化操作而定制的高级综合工具FPGA 的 VNF 编程。在这项工作中，我们调查了以前涵盖这些方面的工作，