The ever-growing consumer demand for more bandwidth and services for less money has been driving service provider networks to their economic limit for some years now. With customer data traffic estimated to grow at a 26 percent rate (year over year) from 2017 to 2022, future networking solutions must show a path to solving tomorrow’s data compound-annual-growth-rate (CAGR) issue in a cost-effective and scalable way.

Pushing the boundary of performance requires the latest and greatest technology along with deploying this technology in a holistic and easy-to-use way. This paper proposes the following set of design principles for taking solutions based on Intel® architecture processors and network functions virtualization (NFV) to the next level of performance and network automation:

• Optimized server configuration
• Software “run-to-completion” model
• Intelligent I/O packet and flow distribution
• Independent scaling of the control and user planes
• Hierarchical quality of service considerations