Network Measurement for 100Gbps Links Using Multicore Processors

Abstract

Network measurement has been playing a crucial role in network operations, since it can not only detect the anomalies, but also facilitate traffic engineering. With the fast development of high speed network of 100Gbps and beyond, how to efficiently monitor and measure the network at flow granularity has become a challenging problem. Although there are dedicated network instrumentation appliances, the flexibility of defining measurement network tasks on a programmable platform is very attractive. In this study, we mainly focus on the evaluation of sketch- based network measurement using a multicore platform supported by Intel DPDK, a fast packet I/O library. We describe the versatile system level design options available for implementing such a programmable measurement platform for 100Gbps network links. Through extensive experiments, we investigate these design options and compare their trade-offs. Specifically, we evaluate the performance of the sketch-based measurement in terms of packet drop rate, processing time per packet and delay per packet. Based on the evaluation over the collected data, we propose the best practical measurement implementation to sustain the line rate while achieving the highest level of programmability.

Publication
In Future Generation Computer Systems (FGCS).