A general model for the virtual router

Router virtualization technology allows multiple router instances to run on the same physical platform. And two features of high performance and flexible resource scheduling are the main challenges for the design of virtual router. In this paper, we firstly analyze, discuss and illustrate the features and limitations of the existent virtual router models proposed by research communities to support the network virtualization technology. Then, we put forward a general model for the virtual router which has a light-weight VMM layer (Virtual Machine Monitor) that can provide multiple standard APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to achieve a fine-grained resource scheduling and make the developers design one flexible and plentiful virtual router instance without knowing anything of the underlying physical platform. At last, this paper proposes three resource evaluation norms to estimate the CPU and I/O resource of the general model and presents the advantages of the general model.