Dynamic virtual routers using multiway segment tree

Recently, research community has drawn lots of attentions in the router virtualization that allows multiple virtual router instances running on the same physical router platform. Thus, the virtualized router should be able to handle packets from different virtual networks. Once the multiple virtual routing tables are merged, memory requirement can be reduced due to the common entries among virtual routing tables. Many previous works use trie-based methods to merge the virtual routing tables. In this paper, we propose a range-based merging method. The data structure is based on the dynamic multiway segment tree (DMST) that is implemented with standard B-tree structure. As our experimental results show, faster lookup speed and incremental update can be achieved. The proposed method performs much better than the trie-based ones in lookup speed and scalability, and has similar memory consumption.