Offloading Strategies for Next-Generation Programmable Infrastructures

• Grant number: 23/05222-3
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: July 01, 2023
• End date: October 31, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Engineering - Electrical Engineering - Telecommunications
• Principal Investigator: Christian Rodolfo Esteve Rothenberg
• Grantee: Arthur de Jesus Simas
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Engenharia Elétrica e de Computação (FEEC). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Company: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Faculdade de Engenharia Elétrica e de Computação (FEEC)
• Associated research grant: 21/00199-8 - SMART NEtworks and ServiceS for 2030 (SMARTNESS), AP.PCPE

Abstract

In the context of modern IT infrastructures, many efforts have been made to move applications to the cloud and move away from highly specialized hardware boxes to commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) equipment. To support emerging verticals and applications that will stress network traffic even more, there is ongoing research towards cloud-native applications, including the development of a new mobile network core used in the 5G Core.It is clear that we need to improve resource utilization in data centers to support the growing demand for more strict infrastructure requirements - e.g. low latency, high throughput, high reliability, scalability, and energy efficiency; which can all be translated to cost efficiency, in the end. This is particularly important for use cases such as the 5G Core and the upcoming 6G.For this end, this project proposes to investigate and evaluate various offloading strategies for next-generation programmable infrastructures running on container orchestration platforms. We propose to work towards hardware offloading using COTS devices to leverage their computing power and optimize the performance of microservice applications, while reducing load on the main processor - leaving it free to serve core application logic, instead of orchestration overheads.