An FPGA-based high-speed network performance measurement for RFC 2544

Abstract

Aiming at the problem that existing network performance measurements have low accuracy for (Request for Comments) RFC 2544, this paper proposes a high-speed network performance measurement based on field-programmable gate array (FPGA). The active measurement method is used to generate probe data frames, and a passive measurement method is employed to count network traffic. According to the statistical laws based on throughput variation, interval stretching mechanism is used to dynamically adjust interframe gap. When our approach approaches the maximum throughput, the network performance parameters are achieved. A prototype based on NetFPGA is also implemented for evaluation. Experimental results show that our approach can be applied in high-speed network and the latency can be accurate to the nanosecond. Compared with network performance measurement using software to send probe data frames and a similar work based on FPGA, our approach can be more flexible and the evaluation data are more accurate.

Accurate and affordable packet-train testing systems for multi-gigabit-per-second networks

“…However, previous works in the network testing area are scarce and mainly focus on replacing configurable traffic generators [3], [4]. Probably the closest proposal to ours is [5], which uses FPGAs to test networking equipment according to RFC2544 [6]. However, such work considers only 1 Gb/s networks, and no previous stateof-art considers accurate time synchronization mechanisms such as GPS, which is needed to accurately measure oneway delay and jitter in a distributed way.…”