High-Throughput Inter-Domain Multicast on the Xen Hypervisor

This work is concerned with multiplexing sensor data streams to a dynamically changing subset of guest operating systems, hosted on the Xen hypervisor. The distribution of sensor data in virtualized environments constitutes an ambitious task. Especially one property of virtualization, namely isolation, impedes unrestricted access to sensor hardware. While being of major importance for domain security, several layers of isolation induce a decrease in overall performance by causing substantial communication overhead across isolation boundaries. A single sensor is able to produce several MBs of output per second. The throughput provided by Xen’s virtual network is not sufficient in this case. In order to realize rapid data transmission between domains, a socket-like, high-throughput IDC mechanism, named XenSocket, was forward-ported to current versions of Xen and Linux and a newly developed library, called libxmc, addresses the need for dynamic sensor-to-domain mapping. The here presented system was designed with general applicability in mind. Therefore, it is possible to distribute any kind of data stream.