Evaluation of UDP tunnel for data replication in data centers and cloud environment

Abstract

The era of Data Centers is underway. Cloud is an off-premise form of computing that stores data on the Internet, whereas a data center refers to on-premise. For cloud-hosting purposes, vendors also often own multiple data centers in several geographic locations to safeguard data availability during outages and other data center failures. Data replication and synchronization techniques have recently attracted a lot of attention of researchers from computing community. Data transferred during replication needs to be secure. Tunneling is one way to secure information before sending it to off-premise replication site. The two kinds of tunneling that exists are TCP and UDP tunnel. UDP tunnel is claimed to be faster during the transfer of data when compared to TCP tunnel, the main reason is that UDP does not make use of excessive acknowledgment messages and also UDP does not suffer the tcp-meltdown problem. In situations where bandwidth is limited, UDP is the preferred option. This paper addresses the reliability of UDP tunnel, while measuring the packet drops when sending different packet sizes. The authors want to determine whether UDP tunnel can be used as the mode of transfer during data replication. A series of tests have been performed and the MTU size have been adjusted for a minimal packet loss. The authors demonstrate that UDP tunnel with an MTU size of 1150 bytes can be used as the mode of transfer for data centers.