On Measuring Available Capacity in High-speed Cloud Networks

TL;DR

This paper evaluates methods for accurately measuring available capacity in high-speed cloud networks, highlighting the effectiveness of UDP sockets up to 2.5 Gbps and DPDK-based approaches up to 10 Gbps.

Contribution

It compares four approaches for high-speed capacity measurement, identifying suitable methods for different network speeds and addressing hardware implementation challenges.

Findings

UDP sockets are effective up to 2.5 Gbps

DPDK implementation works well up to 10 Gbps

High-precision timestamping is crucial for accuracy

Abstract

Measurement of available path capacity with high accuracy over high-speed links deployed in cloud and transport networks is vital for performance assessment and traffic engineering. Methods for measuring the available path capacity rely on sending and receiving time stamped probe packets. A requirement for accurate estimates of the available path capacity is the ability to generate probe packets at a desired rate and also time stamping with high precision and accuracy. This is challenging especially for measurement systems deployed using general purpose hardware. To touch upon the challenge this paper describes and evaluates four approaches for sending and receiving probe packets in high-speed networks (10+ Gbps). The evaluation shows that the baseline approach, based on the native UDP socket, is suitable for available path capacity measurements over links with capacities up to 2.5 Gbps. For higher capacities we show that an implementation based on Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) gives good results up to 10 Gbps.