Linux Software Router: Data Plane Optimization and Performance Evaluation

Abstract

Recent technological advances give a good chance to reach really effective results in the field of open Internet equipments, also called Open Routers (ORs). Some initiatives have been activated since the last few years to investigate the OR and related issues. But despite these activities, large interesting areas still require a deeper investigation. This work tries to give a contribution by reporting the results of an in-depth activity of optimization and testing realized on a PC Open Router architecture based on Linux software and COTS hardware. The main target of this paper has been the forwarding performance evaluation of different OR Linux-based software architectures. This analysis has been performed with both external (throughput and latencies) and internal (profiling) measurements. In particular, for what concerns the external measurements, a set of RFC2544 compliant tests has been proposed and analyzed.