Virtualization and virtual router migration: Application and experimental validation

Virtualization and migration techniques have been largely investigated in Data Center applications to reduce the power consumption and to better utilize the physical resources. In this paper we studied the adoption of such techniques in an IP network and validate our approach in a real testbed based on the use of Software Routers. The contribution is organized in two parts. The first one is devoted to study and to evaluate a power saving solution for IP networks based on the virtualization and migration techniques. We also consider the integration of such techniques with a power saving solution available on network devices, i.e. adaptive link rate, able to adapt line cards power consumption to incoming traffic. The main results show that the effectiveness of the virtualization and migration techniques depends 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 the impact of router migration on the network performance; we consider two different virtualization environments, Linux Container (LXC) and Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM). The experimental results highlights that the impact of router migration, expressed by means of the downtime index, on network performance is negligible.