Reliable Virtual Channels over VPN for Cloud

Abstract

Cloud computing and virtualization are the novel deployments of large-scale computing systems over the Internet. Customers get their computation and storage from the cloud computing providers and can pay for the service on demand. However, the security of communication between a client and cloud is highly concerned and increasingly becoming important. Virtual private network (VPN) is the mostly used technology to ensure the security of network communications. However, there are many factors which results in VPN failure, e.g., poor network, software/hardware problem of VPN gateway. In either case, users will loss a connection and stream communication from the cloud although there are a backup VPN gateway and a backup cloud server. Especially, when users use transmission control protocol (TCP) applications, all the TCP connections will be broken. This paper proposes an improved virtual private network (iVPN) which can continuously serve users who would like to use TCP applications on a cloud site. The users do not have to modify their existing applications or operating systems in order to use iVPN over an existing VPN communication. Moreover, the existing VPN gateway and cloud server can still operate as before.