Elastic virtual private cloud

Abstract

Several Virtual Private Networks are based on IPsec. However, IPsec has not been designed with elasticity in mind, which makes clusters of IPsec security gateways hard to manage for providing high Service Level Agreement (SLA). Thus, these SG clusters need management techniques to maintain their Quality of Service. For example, ISPs use VPNs to secure millions of communications when offloading End-Users from Radio Access Networks towards alternative access networks such as WLANs. Additionally, Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) providers also handle thousands of VPN connections when remote EUs access private clouds services. This paper describes how to provide Traffic Management (TM) and High Availability (HA) for VPN infrastructures by sharing or transferring an IPsec session. TM and HA have been implemented and evaluated over a 2-nodes cluster. We measured their impact on a real time audio streaming simulating a phone conversation. We found out that over a 2 minutes conversation, the impact on QoS measured with POLQA while applying TM or HA, is less than 3%.