As a recent innovation, network functions virtualization (NFV)—with its core concept of replacing hardware middleboxes with software network functions (NFs) implemented in commodity servers—promises cost savings and flexibility benefits. However, transitioning NFs from special-purpose hardware to commodity servers has turned out to be more challenging than expected, as it inevitably incurs performance penalties due to bottlenecks in both software and hardware. To achieve performance comparable to hardware middleboxes, there is a strong demand for a speedup in NF processing, which plays a crucial role in the success of NFV. In this article, we study the performance challenges that exist in general-purpose servers and simultaneously summarize the typical performance bottlenecks in NFV. Through reviewing the progress in the field of NFV acceleration , we present a new taxonomy of the state-of-the-art efforts according to various acceleration approaches. We discuss the surveyed works and identify the respective advantages and disadvantages in each category. We then discuss the products, solutions, and projects emerged in industry. We also present a gap analysis to improve current solutions and highlight promising research trends that can be explored in the future.

中文翻译：

---

为 NFV 加速铺平道路

作为最近的一项创新，网络功能虚拟化 (NFV) - 其核心概念是用在商品服务器中实施的软件网络功能 (NF) 替换硬件中间盒 - 有望节省成本和提高灵活性。然而，事实证明，将 NF 从专用硬件过渡到商用服务器比预期更具挑战性，因为由于软件和硬件的瓶颈，它不可避免地会导致性能损失。为了实现与硬件中间盒相媲美的性能，对 NF 处理的加速有强烈需求，这对 NFV 的成功起着至关重要的作用。在本文中，我们研究了通用服务器中存在的性能挑战，同时总结了 NFV 中的典型性能瓶颈。通过回顾该领域的进展NFV 加速，我们根据各种加速方法提出了最先进的工作的新分类。我们讨论了被调查的作品，并确定了每个类别各自的优缺点。然后我们讨论工业中出现的产品、解决方案和项目。我们还提出了一项差距分析，以改进当前的解决方案并突出未来可以探索的有前景的研究趋势。