Towards hardware accelerated software routers

Abstract

We propose an alternative router design to fill the gap between PC-based open source software routers and commercial high-end routers. Our hardware accelerated software router uses commodity PC hardware running an open source software router for the control path, and couples it with programmable switching hardware by delegating most of the packet forwarding to the switch. We describe a prototype implementation and show that it is capable of handling the traffic requirements of an existing carrier aggregation network.