Performance of OpenVSwitch Bridge Network in Virtual Cloud Environment

Abstract

Cloud computing is the topic of the fastest growing area in the world of information and communication technology today. In order to provide cost-effective infrastructure services that include compute and storage services by cloud service providers, it is important to provide efficient compute, storage, and network virtualization so that these resources can be maximally shared across a large number of tenants in a massive multi-tenant cloud environment. Virtualization technology acts as the backbone of Cloud Computing for virtualization of compute, storage, and network resources that are delivered as services over the network. OpenVSwitch is a multi-tier standard software defined networking (SDN) switch based on the Apache 2.0 open source license. OpenVSwitch works at layer 3 of the OSI protocol in contrast to linux bridge which works at layer 2 of the OSI protocol. This study measures the performance of the OpenVSwitch SDN Switch in a virtual cloud environment. The performance meters measured include TCP upstream, TCP downstream, UDP upstream and UDP downstream. The performance measurement results are compared with the linux bridge performance on the same parameters. The performance measurement results show that there is a slight difference in the performance of OpenVSwitch and Linux Bridge.