Performance Analysis Of A Bifrost Open Source Router

Sammanfattning: In this thesis work, we analyze the performance of a low - cost router which uses a Linux open source distribution optimized for routing, called Bifrost. The development of Bifrost started about ten years ago in the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU). The open source community is huge and within the community exists many useful open source tools that can be integrated and used in open source community. Instead of using only commercial and proprietary equipment, which is a safe but unfortunately expensive solution, it can be a matter of great advantage to use open source technology to a large extent.For the thesis project, we install and configure the Bifrost open source software based router, on a standard desktop computer with three LAN cards and we tested its functionality and evaluated its performance. The Bifrost based router basic features analyzed are two routing protocols (BGP and OSPF) and Inter-VLAN routing. The performance of the Bifrost open source software based router is evaluated in terms of its packet forwarding throughput. The results obtained from the experiment setup for the performance analysis are discussed and compared with a commercial proprietary solution (in our case, a Cisco router of similar calibre). This is important, since the open source distributions also must offer a performance that is comparable or good enough compared with the proprietary solutions.