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SummaryTelecommunication providers continuously evolve their network infrastructure by increasing performance, lowering time to market, providing new services, and reducing the cost of the infrastructure and its operation. Network function virtualization (NFV) on commodity hardware offers an attractive, low‐cost platform to establish innovations much faster than with purpose‐built hardware products. Unfortunately, implementing NFV on commodity processors does not match the performance requirements of the high‐throughput data plane components in large carrier access networks. Therefore, programmable hardware architectures like field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), network processors, and switch silicon supporting the flexibility of the P4 language offer a promising way to account for both performance requirements and the demand to quickly introduce innovations into networks. In this article, we propose a way to offer residential network access with programmable packet processing architectures. On the basis of the highly flexible P4 programming language, we present a design and open source implementation of a broadband network gateway (BNG) data plane that meets the challenging demands of BNGs in carrier‐grade environments. In addition, we introduce a concept of hybrid openBNG design, realizing the required hierarchical quality of service (HQoS) functionality in a subsequent FPGA. The proposed evaluation results show the desired performance characteristics, and our proposed design together with upcoming P4 hardware can offer a giant leap towards highest performance NFV network access.

In this article, the dynamic Taguchi methodology is applied to the design of a barcode scanner. The concurrent engineering process involves a team of design and manufacturing engineers engaged in both hardware and software aspects of the product. The purpose of this experimental study is to determine the correlation between the outcomes of the conventional design and Taguchi optimization. The main contribution of this work in the design of scanners include: (a) application of the Taguchi methodology to yield an optimum design for scanning and comparing it to the analytical design, and (b) proving the existing opto-mechanical design to be optimum, within the signal processing capabilities. Experimental design using orthogonal arrays is established, and experiments of scanning on different barcode designs are conducted. The ideal function of the dynamic methodology is identified and the control and noise factors are chosen for the experimental design. The signal-to-noise (S/N) ratios and sensitivity are calculated using the equations of dynamic Taguchi methodology. Missing data in experiments, due to the combination of extreme ranges of design parameters, are treated by the sequential approximation method. A theoretical optimum unit is assembled and tested as confirmation of the experimental design, based on the response charts for both S/N ratio and sensitivity. The results of the confirmation experiment show that the performance of the scanner design, based on the criterion of the S/N ratios, has improved.