The present document specifies requirements for a set of abstract interfaces enabling a VNF to leverage acceleration services from the infrastructure, regardless of their implementation. The present document also provides an acceleration architectural model to support its deployment model.
 
The goals of the present document are:

• to identify common design patterns that enable an executable VNFC to leverage, at runtime, accelerators to meet their performance objectives;
• to describe how a VNF Provider might leverage those accelerators in an implementation independent way; and
• to define methods in which all aspects of the VNF (VNFC, VNFD, etc.) could be made independent from accelerator implementations.

VNF providers have to mitigate two goals:

• VNFs might have constraints to perform their function within certain power consumption boundaries, CPU core count, PCI express slot usage and with good price/performance ratio; and
• VNFs should accommodate most if not all deployment possibilities.