FPGA-based Router Virtualization: A Power Perspective

Both Internet and semiconductor technology have advanced dramatically over the past decade. These advancements have made great impact on the conventional Internet infrastructure where networking equipment is dedicated on a per network basis. Router virtualization allows a single hardware router to serve packets from multiple networks while ensuring the same throughput and Quality of Service (QoS) guaranteed originally. In this paper, we study the effect of router virtualization, from a power consumption perspective, on the widely used Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) platform. An analytical model is proposed to estimate Layer-3 power consumption under different virtual router configurations. The analytical model is verified using post place-and-route results obtained using state-of-the-art FPGA and the models stand accurate with only a +/- 3% maximum error. Low power FPGA families are explored in this work to highlight the benefits of using such platforms in networking environments. Our experimental results show that by virtualizing, power savings proportional to the number of virtual networks can be achieved compared with non-virtualized routers.