Measuring the performance of network virtualization tool N2N in the design of a cyber warfare training and education platform

• Authors: Kyle E. Stewart;Todd R. Andel;Jeffrey W. Humphries
• Venue: Proceedings of the 2011 Military Modeling & Simulation Symposium
• Year: 2011

Developing realistic cyber warfare training environments enables individualized hands-on training of cyber security topics without using operational networks. Cost, space, time, and reproducibility are major factors that prevent large-scale network replications for individual training purposes. Network virtualization provides an alternative training approach. Network virtualization is an important component in building a decentralized cyber warfare education platform. It allows for software defined, virtual network topologies that are independent of the underlying physical network topology. This creates an environment where students have increased flexibility over the creation and connections of their individual virtual networks. However, there is overhead associated with the virtualization of the network layer. Additional software drivers must encrypt and repackage inbound and outbound packets destined for the virtual network. This research presents a set of experiments that characterize this virtualization performance overhead relative to direct physical connections. Results indicate two to four times reduction in performance with respect to both latency and bandwidth when the network is virtualized relative to direct network connections. The benefit to this cost in performance is the ability to create scalable, flexible network topologies that can be used to create a robust, isolated cyber training environment.