Model of a Virtual Firewall Based on Stochastic Petri Nets

Abstract

This paper presents a modeling of a virtual firewall, based on Stochastic Petri Nets (SPN) to analyze the performance in terms of throughput and delay. The firewall is part of a virtualized multitenant environment. To ensure that every tenant is protected against intrusion attempts, per tenant firewalls are a must. With this protection, each virtual environment located on a multitenant cloud is isolated and data is protected in case of an attack originating from within the cloud. Petri nets introduce some interactions that we have in the real system; we refer to sequential and parallel processing, concurrency, limited resources and mutual exclusion in shared resource access. The modeling is assessed by simulation and results are compared in different scenarios. The modeling also allows us to evaluate necessary resources that must be allocated to achive the desired throughput. Once the impact of key parameters on the global system performance is analyzed, results under several scenarios indicate that our proposal would succeed in an efficient resource allocation scheme in terms of throughput and delay.