High Performance Delay Monitoring for SRv6 Based SD-WANs

TL;DR

This paper presents a high-performance end-to-end delay monitoring solution for SRv6-based SD-WANs using the STAMP protocol, demonstrating that eBPF implementation outperforms user space methods with minimal impact on router capacity.

Contribution

It introduces an efficient delay monitoring method for SRv6 SD-WANs utilizing STAMP and compares different implementation approaches, highlighting eBPF's superior performance.

Findings

eBPF-based implementation outperforms user space methods

Minimal impact on Linux router forwarding capacity

Effective end-to-end delay monitoring for SRv6 SD-WANs

Abstract

Software-Defined Wide Area Networks (SD-WANs) are used to provide services to enterprises with geographically dispersed locations in a flexible and efficient way. We focus on SD-WAN services based on the Segment Routing over IPv6 (SRv6) technology. Performance Monitoring solutions are needed in SD-WANs to detect performance degradation and outages, and optimize network operations. In this paper, we describe a high performance solution for end-to-end delay monitoring for SRv6 based SD-WAN services. The proposed solution leverages the Simple Two-way Active Measurement Protocol (STAMP) to monitor the delay of an SRv6 path between two nodes called STAMP Session-Sender and Session-Reflector. We describe three implementations of the STAMP Session-Sender and Session-Reflector for a Linux software router and compare their performance. In particular, two implementations are based on user space processing and one is based on eBPF. The results show that the eBPF-based implementation outperforms the user space implementations and has a negligible impact on the forwarding capacity of the Linux software router.