Service Characterization for Virtual Routers

In the past decade the virtualization paradigm has been remarkably successful in the server domain, and significant benefits are expected from the virtualization of network resources. However, to date the virtualization capabilities of proprietary systems remain limited while the impact of executing open software routers within system virtualization platforms has not been fully investigated. In this talk we present approaches for router performance evaluation and measurement results comparing the capabilities of various hardware and software routing platforms. Our findings show, that the use of virtualized software forwarding planes is problematic. Aiming to eliminate this bottleneck, we outline a framework for router virtualization which employs open source software components for the control plane and hardware supporting the emerging OpenFlow protocol as a forwarding plane.