  The roll-out of technologies like 5G and the need for multi-terabit bandwidth
in backbone networks requires networking companies to make significant
investments to keep up with growing service demands. For lower capital
expenditure and faster time-to-market, companies can resort to
anything-as-a-service providers to lease virtual resources. Nevertheless,
existing virtualization technologies are still lagging behind next-generation
networks' requirements. This paper breaks the terabit barrier by introducing a
hybrid FPGA-ASIC architecture to virtualize programmable forwarding planes. In
contrast to existing solutions, our architecture involves an ASIC that
multiplexes network flows between programmable virtual switches running in an
FPGA capable of full and partial reconfiguration, enabling virtual switch
hot-swapping. Our evaluation shows the feasibility of a switch virtualization
architecture capable of achieving a combined throughput of 3.2 Tbps by having
up to 26 virtual switch instances in parallel with low resource occupation
overhead.
