  Network Function Virtualization (NFV) refers to the use of commodity hardware
resources as the basic platform to perform specialized network functions as
opposed to specialized hardware devices. Currently, NFV is mainly implemented
based on general purpose processors, or general purpose network processors. In
this paper we propose the use of FPGAs as an ideal platform for NFV that can be
used to provide both the flexibility of virtualizations and the high
performance of the specialized hardware. We present the early attempts of using
FPGAs dynamic reconfiguration in network processing applications to provide
flexible network functions and we present the opportunities for an FPGA-based
NFV platform.
