Improving Network I/O Virtualization for Cloud Computing

Abstract Virtualization is a key technology to enable cloud computing. It enhances resource availability and offers high flexibility and cost effectiveness. However, the driver domain- based model for network I/O virtualization exhibit poor networking performance. In this paper, we evaluate the networking performance of VMs based on Xen. The I/O channel transferring packets between the driver domain and the VMs is shown to be the bottleneck. To overcome this limitation, we proposed a packet aggregation-based mechanism to transfer packets from the driver domain to the VM. Experimental performance evaluation showed that our proposal allows the VMs throughput to scale up at line rates. Furthermore, we studied the impact of the aggregation on the packets delay. For this purpose, we proposed a system modeling based on queuing theory. The proposed model allowed us to dynamically tune the aggregation mechanism to achieve the best tradeoff between the packets delay and throughput. The proposed I/O virtualization model henceforth satisfies the infrastructure providers to offer cloud computing services.

Existing System CLOUD computing is a novel paradigm that provides infrastructure, platform, and software as a service. A cloud platform can be either virtualized or not. Virtualizing the cloud platform increases the resources availability and the flexibility of their management (allocation, migration, etc.). It also reduces the cost through hardware multi¬plexing and helps energy saving. Virtualization is then a key enabling technology of cloud computing. System virtualization refers to the software and hardware techni¬ques that allow partitioning one physical machine into multiple virtual instances that run concurrently and share the underlying physical resources and devices. The virtual machine monitor (VMM), also called hyper¬visor, is a software layer that presents abstractions of the underlying physical resources. It manages the virtual machines (VM) and allows them to share the physical resources especially the network device. Since the hypervi¬sors have been first implemented to provide server virtualization to support compute intensive applications, the I/O virtualization has not been implemented with network intensive applications requirements in mind (high throughput, low latency, etc.). Then, current hypervisors exhibit poor network performance due to the additional overhead incurred by the virtualization layer.

Architecture Diagram

System Specification HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS Processor : Intel Pentium IV Ram : 512 MB Hard Disk : 80 GB HDD SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS Operating System : Windows XP / Windows 7 FrontEnd : Java BackEnd : MySQL 5

C ONCLUSION Virtualization is becoming a key technology to enable deploying efficient and cost-effective cloud computing platforms. However, current network I/O virtualization models still suffer from performance and scalability limitations. In this paper, we showed that VMs exhibit poor reception, transmission, and forwarding throughputs. Through profiling the physical resources, we proved that the I/O channels mechanism prevents the guests from achieving line rate throughput. I/O communication be¬tween the driver domain and the guests is shown to be the most expensive in memory transactions. Memory transac¬tions are limited by the long memory latency that represents a hardware bottleneck of the system. To over-come this limitation, we proposed a packet aggregation mechanism that allows to transfer containers of packets at once. This results in a more efficient I/O communication. Experimental evaluation shows that the proposed packet aggregation mechanism significantly improves the net¬working performance.

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