Performance Prediction of On-NIC Network Functions with Multi-Resource Contention and Traffic Awareness

Network function (NF) offloading on SmartNICs has been widely used in modern data centers, offering benefits in host resource saving and programmability. Co-running NFs on the same SmartNICs can cause performance interference due to contention of onboard resources. To meet performance SLAs while ensuring efficient resource management, operators need mechanisms to predict NF performance under such contention. However, existing solutions lack SmartNIC-specific knowledge and exhibit limited traffic awareness, leading to poor accuracy for on-NIC NFs.