Open Source Routers: A Survey

TL;DR

This survey reviews open source router implementations, highlighting their advantages over commercial solutions and discussing key challenges in developing flexible, open networking hardware.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of existing open source router projects and analyzes major challenges faced in this domain.

Findings

Open source routers offer flexibility compared to commercial solutions.

Various implementations exist with differing features and maturity.

Major challenges include scalability, security, and standardization.

Abstract

Variety, size and complexity of data types, services and applications in Internet is continuously growing up. This increasing of complexity needs more powerful and sophisticated equipment's. One group of these devices that has essential role are routers. Some of vendors produce some elaborate and complex products but the commercial solutions are too closed and inflexible. The term "Open Source Routers" covers a lot of implementations of free software routers. Open Source Routers are solutions to overcome commercial solutions with closed platforms. In this article, we survey the existing implementations and a wide array of past and state-of-the-art projects on open software routers followed by a discussion of major challenges in this area.