On the feasibility of 40 gbps network data capture and retention with general purpose hardware

Performance assessment of 40 Gbit/s off-the-shelf network cards for virtual network probes in 5G networks

“…As a baseline, we first performed a test in which we measured the capture percentages of both DPDK and HPCAP40 [11] with the physical interface in both the bare-metal and PCI passthrough configurations. In the first case, the drivers ran in the host, and in the second, inside a virtual machine.…”

“…For 10 GbE networks, single-threaded capture drivers have been capable of receiving traffic at line rate; however, with faster standards, parallelism becomes necessary and the complexity of the capture systems increases. The driver that powers our VNP, namely, HPCAP40vf, is based on the same architecture that proved capable of capturing and storing traffic in 40 GbE networks (HPCAP40), which was described in detail in a previous paper [11] -here, we will only discuss the main ideas behind that architecture.…”

“…For HPCAP40vf, the storage application is hpcapdd, which copies the data in blocks from the intermediate buffer to a file. Although in a previous work [11] we used a specialized application that worked with SPDK 10 for optimal results, we decided to not use it in these tests as SPDK adds complexity to the installation and we achieved a sufficient rate with the hpcapdd and 5 NVMe drives. This is because we used a better NVMe drive, which doubles the write speed with respect to the prior drive model (Intel DC P3600).…”

“…To handle the specified data rate, we have developed HPCAP40vf, which is an evolved version of our custom Linux Kernel driver for network traffic capture that enables the development of VNPs that rely on available hardware capabilities. This driver is based on previous implementations [11,12] and provides support for virtualization at 40 Gbit/s. We have also tested a VNP that is based on the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) 3 to compare our solution with a more generic solution.…”

Strengthening Packet Loss Measurement from the Network Intermediate Point

“…Therefore, the performance of the capturing system will directly affect the accuracy of such methods in practical applications. Actually, limited to the performance of current hardware (e.g., the processing power of the CPU) and software (e.g., the performance of the popular operating systems), capturing network traffic in a Gigabit environment is still a challenging task [34] [35] [36]. In other words, the capturing system is not able to capture everything.…”