Multiroot: Towards Memory-Efficient Router Virtualization

Thilan Ganegedara, Weirong Jiang, Viktor K. Prasanna

Abstract: Network virtualization has become a powerful scheme to make efficient use of networking hardware. It allows multiple virtual networks to co-exist on the same physical networking substrate. This requires the hardware router to maintain multiple lookup tables. Hence, ultimately the hardware router should be capable of handling packets from different virtual networks. In this paper, we introduce a memory-efficient solution for router virtualization named, Multiroot. We propose this potential scheme for Provider Edge (PE) router virtualization after examining the address space requirement of such networks. Multiroot is a novel merging technique to consolidate all the routing tables to a single merged table. The shared data structure used in our algorithm results in a significant memory usage reduction in the lookup data structure while guaranteeing traffic isolation which is critical in a virtualized environment. This improvement in memory usage results in a very scalable solution for router virtualization in terms of resource usage of the hardware router. Multiroot uses trie data structure and can be implemented on a hardware or a software platform. Experiments show that our solution can achieve up to 5 fold memory usage reduction compared to state-of-the-art techniques present in literature.