Performance Investigation and Comparison between Virtual Networks and Physical Networks Based on an Advanced Testbed Network

Virtualization is one of the key technologies in the evolution of computer networks. Recently, many research institutes, universities and companies are building Cloud computing platforms or networked testbed environment based on virtualization technologies. The reliability of virtual networks has become a hot topic, which has been attracting significant attentions in the network research community. In this paper, we evaluate, and in particular compare, the performance of virtual networks and existing physical networks based on our advanced networked testbed, called Sea-Cloud Innovation Environment (SCIE). The performance investigation is carried out under both intra-domain (i.e., national networks) and inter-domain (international networks) environment, in terms of several key performance metrics including round trip time, throughput, packet loss, and jitter. The results obtained from this evaluation can provide useful reference to optimize the performance of the virtualized network platform.