A container-based fast bridge for virtual routers on commodity hardware

Abstract

Virtual routers on commodity hardware are an attractive solution for service providers that look for extensibility, flexibility, reuse and low deployment cost. However, these routers still suffer from performance limitations due to the virtualization overhead and the commodity hardware architecture itself. In this paper, we first evaluate the baseline forwarding performance of virtual routers based on a Xen environment. Then, we show that the memory latency is the bottleneck. Hence, we propose a Fast Bridge that demultiplexes incoming packets and then transfers them to the destined guest machines. It constructs packets containers in the driver domain, based on their destination and their delay constraints. Then it transfers them as a unit to the guests. This allows transferring more packets and fastest memory access and results in a much better throughput with an acceptable guaranteed delay. ©2010 IEEE.