Building a Single-Box 100 Gbps Software Router

Abstract

Commodity-hardware technology has advanced in great leaps in terms of CPU, memory, and I/O bus speeds. Benefiting from the hardware innovation, recent software routers on commodity PC now report about 10 Gbps in packet routing. In this paper we map out expected hurdles and projected speed-ups to reach 100 Gbps in packet routing on a single commodity PC. With careful measurements, we identify two notable bottlenecks for our goal: CPU cycles and I/O bandwidth. For the former, we propose reducing per-packet processing overhead with softwarelevel optimizations and buying extra computing power with GPUs. To improve the I/O bandwidth, we suggest scaling the performance of I/O hubs that limits packet routing speed to well before 50 Gbps.