Research on Software Architecture of the Extensible Services Router

With the rapid development of network technology, it is increasingly important to dynamically upgrade router's software. In this paper, the authors present new software architecture to be applied to extensible services router. The novel feature of the architecture is the ability to dynamically load and configure extensible components at run time. Each component implements one function such as packets classification, packets scheduling and routing protocol. We design a simple configuration language (ESRCL) to configure and manage the router. The architecture can be configured according to the packet flows. At present, a prototype system based on highly efficient router operating system (HEROS) has been finished.