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Adaptive Inference on Reconfigurable SmartNICs for Traffic Classification

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Advanced Information Networking and Applications (AINA 2023)

Abstract

Traffic classification is an essential part of network management and monitoring, and has been widely used to help improve security and detect anomalies. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have shown good performance for many of these traffic classification tasks, at the cost of a heavy computational burden. To efficiently classify incoming packets, hardware accelerators such as FPGAs, which are integrated with smart network cards, can provide the required parallelism with energy efficiency to execute such CNNs. Optimization techniques such as pruning can further improve inference speeds at the cost of some accuracy, but are usually static (i.e., cannot change after deployment). Given that, this work implements an adaptive framework to process different traffic classification tasks efficiently. It works by generating multiple pruned CNN hardware models during design time; and at run-time exploits the accuracy vs throughput trade-off of pruning by dynamically and automatically switching between the pre-generated models according to the number of incoming packets and the different classification tasks at a given moment. Compared to the regular (static) solution, our implementation improves the Quality of Experience up to \(1.14\times \), executing up to \(1.51\times \) more inferences and improving energy efficiency per inference up to \(1.35\times \).

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Acknowledgements

This study was financed in part by Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - Brasil (CAPES) - Brazil - Finance Code 001, São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) grant #2021/06825-8, FAPERGS and CNPq.

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Correspondence to Julio Costella Vicenzi .

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Vicenzi, J.C., Korol, G., Jordan, M.G., Rutzig, M.B., Filho, A.C.S.B. (2023). Adaptive Inference on Reconfigurable SmartNICs for Traffic Classification. In: Barolli, L. (eds) Advanced Information Networking and Applications. AINA 2023. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 654. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28451-9_12

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