Virtualization and Virtual Router Migration: Application and Experimental Validation

Virtualization and migration techniques have been largely investigated in datacenter applications to reduce the power consumption and to better utilize the server resource. In this paper we show an application of the techniques in a router network and validate them in a software router network. The contribution is organized in two parts. The first one is devoted to study and evaluate a power saving application based on the virtualization and migration and applied in network equipped with rate adaptive line cards, whose power consumption depends on the offered traffic. The main achieved results show how the effectiveness of the virtualization and migration techniques depend on the fixed power consumption of the routers and increases for high values of this component. The second part of the paper is devoted to evaluate router the migration performance when two virtualization environments based on Linux Container (LXC) and Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) respectively are used. The measure of the migration time in the experimental test-bed highlights how virtual router migrations are possible with little degradation on the network performance.