A splitting-after-merging approach to multi-FIB compression and fast refactoring in virtual routers

Abstract

Virtual routers are gaining increasing attention in the research field of future networks. As the core network device to achieve network virtualization, virtual routers have multiple virtual instances coexisting on a physical router platform, and each instance retains its own forwarding information base (FIB). Thus, memory scalability suffers from the limited on-chip memory. In this paper, we present a splitting-after-merging approach to compress the FIBs, which not only improves the memory efficiency but also offers an ideal split position to achieve system refactoring. Moreover, we propose an improved strategy to save the time used for system rebuilding to achieve fast refactoring. Experiments with 14 real-world routing data sets show that our approach needs only a unibit trie holding 134 188 nodes, while the original number of nodes is 4 569 133. Moreover, our approach has a good performance in scalability, guaranteeing 90 000 000 prefixes and 65 600 FIBs.