Creating Virtual Networks for Distributed Virtual Computing Environment

Virtual network is an important approach to support multiple legacy applications running unmodified in distributed virtual computing environments. A virtual networking approach called VirNet is proposed in this paper. VirNet can build multiple customized and isolated virtual networks simultaneously on the same physical hosts in the network, and it enables existing distributed applications written for LANs to run seamlessly on Internet. VirNet is designed completely in user space and requires no change to the kernel of operating systems. Experimental evaluation performed by a reference implementation shows that VirNet is efficient. The latency overhead caused by VirNet is very small and the bandwidth of VirNet is more than 85% of the available physical network bandwidth in both the LAN and emulated WAN environments.