Measurement and Simulation of High-Performance Packet Processing in Software Routers

The possibility of using flexible and cost-efficient commodity hardware instead of expensive custom hardware has generated wide interest in software routers. Performance measurement and simulation have become important approaches for identifying bottlenecks of such systems to predict and improve the performance. We measure the performance of software routers using current multi-core hardware architectures. We introduce an innovative node model for intra-node resource contention and realized a resource management extension for the widely-used network simulator ns-3 which allows to evaluate and predict the performance of current and future software router architectures.