FlowMon-DPDK: Parsimonious Per-Flow Software Monitoring at Line Rate

Abstract

Testing experimental network devices requires deep performance analysis, which is usually performed with expensive, not flexible, hardware equipment. With the advent of highspeed packet I/O frameworks, general purpose equipments have narrowed the performance gap in respect of dedicated hardware and a variety of software-based solutions have emerged for handling traffic at very high speed. While the literature abounds with software traffic generators, existing monitoring solutions do not target worst-case scenarios (i.e., 64B packets at line rate) that are particularly relevant for stress-testing high-speed network functions, or occupy too many resources. In this paper we first analyse the design space for high-speed traffic monitoring that leads us to specific choices characterizing FlowMon-DPDK, a DPDK-based software traffic monitor that we release as an open source project. In a nutshell, FlowMon-DPDK provides tunable fine-grained statistics at both packet and flow levels. Experimental results demonstrate that our traffic monitor is able to provide per-flow statistics with 5-nines precision at high-speed (14.88 Mpps) using an exiguous amount of resources. Finally, we showcase FlowMon-DPDK usage by testing two open source prototypes for stateful flow-level end-host and in-network packet processing.