Fujitsu Develops Virtual Router Acceleration

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Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. announced the development of technology to accelerate virtual routers, which play a major role in the functionality of networks in virtual environments.

Server virtualization, which concentrates multiple applications and the infrastructure functionality of network processing in a general-purpose server environment, is spreading beyond datacenters to the field of edge computing, including wireless base stations and Mobile Edge Computing (MEC)(1). The technology also proves useful in areas including societal infrastructure with applications like traffic management, and in entertainment, where it can be used to deliver viewers content like sporting events. As data volumes increase and systems become increasingly complex, however, the CPU resources required for packet processing in a virtual network increase. This reduces the number of applications that can run on a single server, and leads to lower server aggregation rates.

To resolve this issue, Fujitsu Laboratories has now developed technology to accelerate packet address control, which had been a performance bottleneck, while also offloading the processing of router functions in the virtual network to field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs)(2). This speeds up packet processing performance eighteen-fold compared with existing virtual routers, while reducing the use of CPU resources to about one thirteenth that of existing technology.

With this technology, Fujitsu Laboratories will deliver high performance virtual networks with a low computational burden, supporting the digital transformation of companies by improving server utilization efficiency for businesses that will use large volumes of data in the 5G era.

Development Background and Issues
Server virtualization, which concentrates multiple applications and network processing functionality using a virtual environment on a general-purpose server, is becoming increasingly common and widespread as digital transformation progresses. Moreover, by accelerating digital transformation within a wide variety of companies, new services are also being created that link applications together. Against this background, the volumes of data handled by these applications is trending upwards, leading to issues of increasing network complexity and increased computational burdens.

As networks grow increasingly complex and computational burdens increase, issues have arisen with improving packet processing performance in the virtual routers that are essential to flexible network structures, as well as with reducing the CPU resources used for network processing, in the effort to deliver efficient server virtualization. By resolving these issues, it will become possible to increase the number of applications that can run on a server, as well as decrease the number of servers needed for a system, reducing investment costs for customers.