The IEEE International Workshop on NEtwork Accelerated FunctIOns (NEAF-IO '17) will be held on July 3-7, 2017 in Bologna, Italy along with the 3rd IEEE International Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft 2017).

Virtual software network functions (VNFs) enable easy scaling and on-demand provisioning. However, meeting the performance requirements of modern networks is hard when using (virtualized) software only. New VNFs could leverage the network itself to scale their designs to the required performance and reliability levels. For instance, load balancers could offload forwarding decisions to SDN devices based on OpenFlow. Novel technologies based on reconfigurable hardware, such as P4-based switches, can implement stateful forwarding algorithms, delegating to the switch functions that could not be programmed on legacy devices. Furthermore, a new generation of smart network interface cards (NICs) promise to introduce programmability also at the NIC level. Given the above considerations, this workshop has the aim of openly discussing novel design methods and future trends that blur the demarcation line between the functions provided by the network and those provided by VNFs.