The roll-out of technologies like 5G and the need for multi-terabit bandwidth in backbone networks requires networking companies to make significant investments to keep up with growing service demands. For lower capital expenditure and faster time-to-market, companies can resort to anything-as-a-service providers to lease virtual resources. Nevertheless, existing virtualization technologies are still lagging behind next-generation networks' requirements. This paper breaks the terabit barrier by introducing a hybrid FPGA-ASIC architecture to virtualize programmable forwarding planes. In contrast to existing solutions, our architecture involves an ASIC that multiplexes network flows between programmable virtual switches running in an FPGA capable of full and partial reconfiguration, enabling virtual switch hot-swapping. Our evaluation shows the feasibility of a switch virtualization architecture capable of achieving a combined throughput of 3.2 Tbps by having up to 26 virtual switch instances in parallel with low resource occupation overhead.

翻译：5G等技术的推出以及主干网络对多地形带宽的需要,要求网络公司进行大量投资,以跟上日益增长的服务需求。为了降低资本支出,加快时间到市场,公司可以求助于任何“服务供应商”租赁虚拟资源。然而,现有的虚拟化技术仍然落后于下一代网络的要求。本文通过引入一个可编程转发机虚拟化的FPGA-ASIC混合结构打破了巨型屏障。与现有的解决方案相反,我们的架构涉及一个“ASIC”,即多轴网络在可编程虚拟开关中流动,在可完全和部分重组的FPGA中运行,使虚拟开关能够进行热吸。我们的评估表明,开关虚拟化结构是可行的,通过拥有多达26个虚拟开关,同时拥有低资源占用间接费用,能够实现3.2 Tbps的合并吞吐量。