Experimental performance evaluation of a virtual software router

Software routers (SRs) are an alternative low-cost and moderate-performance router solutions implemented with general-purpose workstations able to host multiple network interface cards (NICs). Workstations can be programmed to forward packets between different NICs and to participate in routing functions. Virtualization can be used to model new protocols or hardware systems in software and without modifying the host's kernel. However virtualized routers are expected to suffer from performance degradation because of software execution overhead. In this paper, we investigate the performance impact of a virtual software router (VSR) in comparison to that of a SR. We present the performance of VSRs hosted by different workstations - with different number of processing cores.