SmartNIC is located in edge cloud servers, which belongs to the EC infrastructure and accelerate network performance at the same time.
The below diagram presents the circumstance of SmartNIC Datacenter Services across all Clouds. Specifically, SmartNIC is located in edge cloud servers, which belongs to the EC infrastructure and SmartNIC can provide accelerated service and more management convenience for VPC, 5G UPF can use SmartNIC to accelerate the performance.
In IEC type 5 project includes , the SmartNIC has TCP/IP protocol processing capabilities and replace OVS-DPDK offload into SmartNIC to accelerate the network performance and save computing resources which is important in the edge cloud environment as well as CT(connection-tracking) is supported and also offloaded into Smart NIC to provide security needs.
For the application of the project, part of the UPF functions like load balance, forwarding, dpi, etc offloaded into SmartNIC to enhance the performance of UPF who will be deployed in carrier's edge cloud datacentersby PCIe protocol which can save more edge computing resources by delete OVS-DPDK and and offload TCP/IP protocol into NIC to accelerate network performance and reduce less workload of others such as CPU, memory.
SmartNIC support RDMA protocol. It will decrease latency and CPU workload by reduce external memory replication and context switching.
SmartNIC support SR-IOV function which general PF and more VFs with independent address space for hypervisor, It will reduce workload, latency and improve network I/O performance in hypervisor system.
SmartNIC provide plug-n-play, maintenance and remote resource management function, which will be easy to extend and manage cluster.