DR AF T Architectures for Fast and Flexible Software Routers

Network experiments contribute greatly to advancements in computer networks. Scientific prototypes being at the heart of this research should be able to reflect realistic conditions of current and future network environments. Only recently, specialized software frameworks such as DPDK or netmap have shown that handling 100 million packets per second is possible on affordable commodity server hardware. Building on this development, we designed MoonRoute, a flexible framework for building software routers with the ability to reuse existing components. MoonRoute also allows for quick prototyping of individual components in the packet processing pipeline of a software router with the Lua scripting language. Based on this framework, we discuss a proposed architecture for high-speed software routers. Our reference implementation of this architecture can saturate multiple 10 Gbit/s Ethernet ports with minimum-sized packets. These properties of our architecture make MoonRoute an attractive framework for conducting network experiments, investigating new components and applying them to network bandwidths of 40 Gbit/s and beyond. MoonRoute, including the reference router implementation, runs on Linux and is available as free software under the MIT license. CCS Concepts •Networks → Network experimentation;