Fairness Issues in Software Virtual Routers

In this paper, the authors investigate the building of a virtual router platform that ensures isolation and fairness between concurrent virtual routers. Recent developments in commodity x86 hardware enable one to take advantage of the flexibility and dearth of resources available to a software router to build a virtual router platform. Using commodity x86 hardware they show that it is viable to run highly experimental and untrusted router systems along side a production router on the same hardware platform whilst remaining performant. They investigate the extent to which they can isolate a virtual router running experimental code from other virtual routers.