Improving the Performance of an IP-over-P 2 P Overlay for Nested Cloud Environments

IPOP is a relatively new open source software that allows users to define their own private virtual networks, leveraging social network connections. Achieved throughput over IPOP links is bellow what is measured over physical links. Analysis shows that a main source of overhead is the encryption provided by IPOP. Traffic is encrypted by default over all IPOP connections, with no granularity in enabling or disabling it. This research proposes and implements the feature of selective security, in which only a few users will be affected by the encryption overhead. The investigation produced detailed measurements in order to profile the application and help on improving the performance. Code analysis shows that the current IPOP version suffers from implementation issues in the code handling packet forwarding. Solutions are proposed, implemented and tested, with discovered issues being discussed.