Revealing the Necessary Conditions to Achieve 80Gbps High-Speed PC Router

The core networking research community is witnessing a trend that many researchers attempt, and some achieve, a high speed packet processing rate using software-based approach. Yet, the extent of performance that can be obtained by deploying only Personal Computers (PCs), or Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) devices, remains as an open-ended question. This is because 1) industrial achievements often involve custom hardware developments that are not counted as COTS devices, and their technical details are not revealed, and 2) research papers do not focus on the goal to answer the question of the best performance achievable using only COTS devices. In this paper, we show our implementation of an 80Gbps PC router using only COTS devices along with our configuration details. We demonstrate achievement of 128B 80Gbps full wire-rate packet forwarding with routing lookups of 500K BGP full-route routing table, using a recent high speed routing lookup technology called Poptrie [1]. We further reveal the conditions that are necessary to construct the 80Gbps high speed PC router by presenting the performance comparisons with and without the specific parameter settings. We conclude with discussion on the promising prospects of software router application in datacenters.