Multi-core CPUs, along with recent advances in memory and buses,
render commodity hardware a strong candidate for software router
virtualization. We would like to share the experience of a 3-year
research project on the design and implementation of a platform
for high-performance and flexible virtual routers on multi-core
general purpose PCs.

The Click software suite is a core component of our platform and has
been extensively used to prototype the data plane of our virtual
router platform. In particular, we exploited Click to analyse the bottlenecks of our

The paper "On the Performance Benefits of Multihoming Route Control" written by A Akella et al. in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking February 2008 estimates the possible gain of performances while correctly route traffic in multihomed enterprise environments.

The paper focus on two metrics: the RTT (called turnaround time) and the throughput of http-based downloads.