FRuG: A benchmark for packet forwarding in future networks

The ossification of Internet infrastructure and protocols have hindered the advancement of itself. GENI, AKARI and several other similar initiatives are pushing forward to overcome this hindrance. They facilitate researchers with networking platforms dedicated for innovative networking experiments. In these virtualized platforms, researchers can define their own forwarding schemes which can be radically different from the existing solutions. However, neither researchers nor the vendors are endowed with benchmarks to evaluate their new schemes. In this paper we introduce a Flexible Rule Generator, FRuG, an entirely user controlled benchmarking tool for evaluating future packet forwarding algorithms. With FRuG, rule generation does not need to be restricted to a fixed number of fields anymore, which makes it highly generic. It allows the user to select the protocol fields and the distribution of each field, which can either be defined by the user or configured to follow the distribution of an input seed file. The user has the complete control over the structure and the size of the rule table which makes it a powerful benchmark to assess various packet forwarding algorithms and for different types of routers (ex. edge routers, core routers, etc.). FRuG consists of an IPv4 prefix analyzer and generator, MAC address analyzer and generator, and a generic rule generator. We believe that FRuG will be a very useful tool to the networking research community with the paradigm shifts in networking like network virtualization, which takes packet forwarding to a completely new level. FRuG is an opensource tool freely available at http://sites.google.com/site/thilangane/research.