PEARL: a programmable virtual router platform
Gaogang Xie, Peng He, Hongtao Guan, Zhenyu Li, Yingke Xie, Layong Luo, Jianhua Zhang, Yonggong Wang, Kavé Salamatian · IEEE Communications Magazine · 2011
Programmable routers supporting virtualization are a key building block for bridging the gap between new Internet protocols and their deployment in real operational networks. This article presents the design and implementation of PEARL, a programmable virtual router platform with relatively high performance. It offers high flexibility by allowing users to control the configuration of both hardware and software data paths. The platform makes use of fast lookup in hardware and software exceptions in commodity multicore CPUs to achieve highspeed packet processing. Multiple isolated packet streams and virtualization techniques ensure isolation among virtual router instances.