Virtual Network Performance Evaluation for Future Internet Architectures

Internet Service Providers resist innovating in the network core, fearing that deploying a new protocol or service compromises the network operation and their profit, as a consequence. Therefore, a new Internet model, called Future Internet, which enables core innovation, must accommodate new protocols and services with the current scenario, isolating each protocol stack from others. Virtualization is the key technique that provides concurrent protocol stack capability to the Future Internet elements. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of three widespread virtualization tools, Xen, VMware, and OpenVZ, considering their use for router virtualization. We conduct experiments with benchmarking tools to measure the overhead introduced by virtualization in terms of memory, processor, network, and disk performance of virtual routers running on commodity hardware. We also evaluate the effects of the increasing number of virtual machines on Xen network virtualization mechanism. Our results show that Xen best fits virtual router requirements. Moreover, Xen fairly shares the network access among virtual routers, but needs further enhancement when multiple virtual machines simultaneously forward traffic.