A study of networking software induced latency

For long time, high-speed packet processing has been reserved for specialized hardware devices since software based solutions were not able to achieve the required performance. However, off-the-shelf packet processing hardware and software improved over the last years, which is why software based solutions cope with high-speed traffic nowadays. Due to the flexibility of software there is a trend towards doing packet processing in software, e.g. using OpenFlow or virtual switches. Although packet processing in software offers many capabilities, the complexity of such software bases solutions makes it hard to evaluate, optimize, or predict the networking performance of servers, end user hosts, or routers. We present a study that investigates the packet latency caused by the packet processing in the Linux network stack. We develop a simulation model in ns-3 for packet processing via the Linux network stack that helps understanding of its performance implications. We validate our simulation model based on measurements with nanosecond accuracy and software profiling.

[1]  Raffaele Bolla,et al.  Linux Software Router: Data Plane Optimization and Performance Evaluation , 2007, J. Networks.

[2]  Thomas Plagemann,et al.  Extending network simulators with communication software execution models , 2013, 2013 Fifth International Conference on Communication Systems and Networks (COMSNETS).

[3]  Daniel Raumer,et al.  Validated Model-Based Performance Prediction of Multi-Core Software Routers , 2014, PIK Prax. Informationsverarbeitung Kommun..

[4]  Daniel Raumer,et al.  Performance characteristics of virtual switching , 2014, 2014 IEEE 3rd International Conference on Cloud Networking (CloudNet).

[5]  Scott O. Bradner,et al.  Benchmarking Methodology for Network Interconnect Devices , 1996, RFC.

[6]  Daniel Raumer,et al.  MoonGen: A Scriptable High-Speed Packet Generator , 2014, Internet Measurement Conference.

[7]  Rob Sherwood,et al.  OFLOPS: An Open Framework for OpenFlow Switch Evaluation , 2012, PAM.

[8]  Ness B. Shroff,et al.  A Device-Independent Router Model , 2008, IEEE INFOCOM 2008 - The 27th Conference on Computer Communications.

[9]  Luigi Rizzo,et al.  Transparent acceleration of software packet forwarding using netmap , 2012, 2012 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM.

[10]  Sangjin Han,et al.  PacketShader: a GPU-accelerated software router , 2010, SIGCOMM '10.

[11]  Christian Benvenuti.  Understanding Linux Network Internals , 2005 .

[12]  L. Angrisani,et al.  Measurement of Processing and Queuing Delays Introduced by a Software Router in a Single-Hop Network , 2005, 2005 IEEE Instrumentationand Measurement Technology Conference Proceedings.

[13]  Ram Huggahalli,et al.  Direct cache access for high bandwidth network I/O , 2005, 32nd International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA'05).

[14]  Torsten Meyer,et al.  Extensible and realistic modeling of resource contention in resource-constrained nodes , 2013, 2013 International Symposium on Performance Evaluation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (SPECTS).

[15]  Katerina J. Argyraki,et al.  Toward Predictable Performance in Software Packet-Processing Platforms , 2012, NSDI.

[16]  Luigi Rizzo,et al.  netmap: A Novel Framework for Fast Packet I/O , 2012, USENIX ATC.

[17]  Katerina J. Argyraki,et al.  RouteBricks: exploiting parallelism to scale software routers , 2009, SOSP '09.

[18]  Daniel Raumer,et al.  A study of network stack latency for game servers , 2014, 2014 13th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games.

[19]  M. Casado,et al.  Virtual Switching in an Era of Advanced Edges , 2010 .

[20]  Luca Deri,et al.  High speed network traffic analysis with commodity multi-core systems , 2010, IMC '10.

[21]  Martín Casado,et al.  Extending Networking into the Virtualization Layer , 2009, HotNets.

[22]  EDDIE KOHLER,et al.  The click modular router , 2000, TOCS.

[23]  Raffaele Bolla,et al.  Pc-based software routers: high performance and application service support , 2008, PRESTO '08.

[24]  Georg Carle,et al.  Adaptive load-aware sampling for network monitoring on multicore commodity hardware , 2013, 2013 IFIP Networking Conference.

[25]  Thomas R. Henderson,et al.  Network Simulations with the ns-3 Simulator , 2008 .

[26]  Markus Fiedler,et al.  Delay Performance in IP Routers , 2004 .