nFTP: An Approach to Improve Performance of FTP Protocol on the Virtual Network Environment in the Same Physical Host

Abstract

The future of the Internet is applications and services based on virtualization environment. The strong points of virtualization technology are high availability, high flexibility and the effective cost of application management. Currently, network applications are always running on some physical network. Based on virtualization technology there are two main approaches for network virtualization. First one is based on network device virtualization, the second one is based on network virtualization where connected network devices and servers are virtual machines. In the second approach, transmitting information between virtual servers is performed primarily based on the traditional network protocols. However, when the virtual machines of a virtual network are located in a same physical host, the traditional network protocols don’t take full advantage of virtualization technology. The time for packets routing through the network devices (virtual machines) on the routing path is not reduced even though all virtual network devices are on the same physical host. In this paper, the authors offer a new approach to improve speed/performance of the network protocols on the virtual environment by directly copying data from one virtual machine to the other. Within the scope of this paper, to illustrate this idea, the authors focus on improving the performance of the traditional FTP protocol. The results of our experiments show that the performance of improved FTP protocol (nFTP) has increased significantly in the virtual network environment. This approach opens a wide range of research topics to improve performance of network protocols on virtual networks.