An Extensible Design of a Load-Aware Virtual Router Monitor in User Space

Abstract

Router virtualization enables multiple virtual routers to be hosted on a physical shared substrate, and hence facilitates network management and experimentation. One critical issue of router virtualization is resource allocation of virtual routers. We explore this issue in the user-space design in order to allow extensibility. We develop a user-space load-aware virtual router monitor (LVRM) atop a commodity multicore architecture, with a key feature that it can dynamically manage CPU core resources among virtual routers based on their traffic loads. Also, LVRM adopts an extensible design so that each component can support different variants of implementation. We implement a proof-of-concept prototype for LVRM and empirically evaluate its performance overhead. Our work provides insights into resource management in user space in the context of router virtualization.