The shortcomings of ETSI Network Function Virtualization
As soon CMOS scaling will hit hard physical limits, energy efficiency is the key to the evolution of networks and the data plane technology.
Implementing services by forwarding traffic through a chain of (virtualized) network functions implemented on different cores or even different servers is extremely energy inefficient.
An architecture is needed which allows to apply network functions to packets, while the packets ideally stay in the cache of a single core. The slide set summarizes recent approaches in this direction.
Energy efficient data plane evolution