A Generic High-Performance Architecture for VPN Gateways

Abstract

Virtual private network (VPN) gateways are widely applied to provide secure end-to-end remote access and to relay reliable interconnected communication in cloud computing. As network convergence nodes, the performance of VPN gateways is limited by traditional methods of packet receiving and sending, the kernel protocol stack and the virtual network interface card. This paper proposes a generic high-performance architecture (GHPA) for VPN gateways in consideration of its generality and performance. In terms of generality, we redesign a generic VPN core framework by modeling a generic VPN communication model, formulating generic VPN core technologies and presenting corresponding core algorithms. In terms of performance, we propose a three-layer GHPA for VPN gateways by designing a VPN packet processing layer based on a data plane development kit (DPDK), implementing a user space basic protocol stack and applying our proposed generic VPN core framework. On the basis of the research work above, we implement a high-performance VPN (HP-VPN) and a traditional VPN (T-VPN) that complies with GHPA and traditional methods, respectively. Experimental results prove that the performance of HP-VPN based on GHPA is superior to T-VPN and other common VPNs in RTT, system throughput, packet forwarding rate and jitter. In addition, GHPA is extensible and applicable for other VPN gateways to improve their performance.