An extensible software router data-path for dynamic low-level service deployment

This paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of an extensible software data path for a programmable router. The objective is to provide a configurable, dynamic and flexible software router architecture to enable service deployment at run time. The router forwarding plane uses the forwarding element (FE) model provided by the forwarding and control element separation (ForCES) architecture. The design relies on distributed software components to implement the modular router data path related to the FE model. The proposed architecture ensures dynamic reconfiguration of the data path topology needed for low-level service deployment. Results on achievable performance using the proposed extensible forwarding plane to achieve dynamic deployment of service components are reported