Open source routing at 10Gb/s
Olof Hagsand, Robert Olsson, Bengt Gördén · 2009
We present throughput measurements using the Bifrost Linux open source router on selected PC hardware. The hardware consists of eight CPU cores, NUMA architecture, double PCIe buses and Intel and SUN 10Gb/s interface cards. These cards are equipped with hardware classifiers that dispatch packets to multiple DMA queues which enables parallel processing of packet forwarding and load-balancing between the multiple CPUs. In our experiments, we send a multiflow, simplex packet stream through an open-source router. We measure the throughput and vary packet size, active CPUs, and router configuration. In the experiments, we use an IP flow and packet-length distribution that we claim is realistic for many network scenarios. Using these realistic traffic streams, we show how speeds close to10Gb/s is achievable for normal Internet traffic. In particular, we show how the use of multiple CPUs increases the throughput up to a breakpoint which in our setting is at four CPUs. Further, we show that adding filters and full BGP tables have minor effects in the performance. With these results, we claim that open source routers using new PC architectures are a viable option for use in 10Gb/s networks for many network scenarios.