Building Fast but Flexible Software Routers

Creating quick and dirty prototypes is a simple and effective way to demonstrate the feasibility of new ideas in network research. Though, small scale proof-of-concepts may lack the performance needed to apply them to real world test cases. Thanks to powerful packet processing frameworks such as netmap and DPDK, high-performance packet forwarding systems can be implemented in software today.We present MoonRoute, a framework dedicated to developing powerful software routers. It is built on top of DPDK and utilizes a highly parallelized architecture to achieve high performance (see Section 2).MoonRoute offers methods to reuse existing libraries and a scripting interface for easy extensibility (see Section 3). An example implementation based on the MoonRoute framework is carefully evaluated to demonstrate the performance and compare it to other relevant software routers (see Section 4).The entire MoonRoute framework including a reference implementation of a software router is available as free software under MIT license [2]. A technical report featuring details about our architecture and more profiling results is available [1].