VERA: an extensible router architecture

We recognize two trends in router design: increasing pressure to extend the set of services provided by the router and increasing diversity in the hardware components used to construct the router. The consequence of these two trends is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to map the services onto the underlying hardware. Our response to this situation is to define a virtual router architecture, called VERA, that hides the hardware details from the forwarding functions. This paper presents the details of VERA and reports our preliminary experiences implementing various aspects of the architecture.