On dynamic migration of virtual router

Abstract

The migration of virtual router has attracted a lot of attention from researchers in the new network architecture field, due to the potential to cope with emerging challenges, such as energy consumption and resource fragmentation problem. In this paper, we focus on general virtual router architecture VRSM (Virtual Router Supporting Migration), composed by a cluster of servers. Compared with other architectures, VRSM introduces intelligently interface plane, management switch and data switch. The interface plane is used to switch data traffic to new forward instances and other two switches can guarantee bandwidth separation between migration traffic and data traffic in migration process. Based on VRSM architecture, we put forward a migration strategy DMVR (Dynamic Migration of Virtual Router), which can dynamically migrate a virtual router instance from one physical server to another without disrupting the network topology. Our experiment shows that DMVR strategy results in minimal impact in the data plane and brief downtime in the control plane.