RouteBricks: Exploiting Parallelism to Scale Software Routers

The authors revisit the problem of scaling software routers, motivated by recent advances in server technology that enable high-speed parallel processing - a feature router workloads appear ideally suited to exploit. They propose a software router architecture that parallelizes router functionality both across multiple servers and across multiple cores within a single server. By carefully exploiting parallelism at every opportunity, they demonstrate a 35Gbps parallel router prototype; this router capacity can be linearly scaled through the use of additional servers.