Despite network monitoring and testing being critical for computer networks, current solutions are both extremely expensive and inflexible. This demo presents OSNT (www.osnt.org), a community-driven, high-performance, open-source traffic generator and capture system built on top of the NetFPGA-10G board which enables flexible network testing. The platform supports full line-rate traffic generation regardless of packet size across the four card ports, packet capture filtering and packet thinning in hardware and sub-msec time precision in traffic generation and capture, corrected using an external GPS device. Furthermore, it provides a software APIs to test the dataplane performance of multi-10G switches, providing a starting point for a number of different test cases. OSNT flexibility is further demonstrated through the OFLOPS-turbo platform: an integration of OSNT with the OFLOPS OpenFlow switch performance evaluation platform, enabling control and data plane evaluation of 10G switches. This demo showcases the applicability of the OSNT platform to evaluate the performance of legacy and OpenFlow-enabled networking devices, and demonstrates it using commercial switches

Antichi, G

Moore, AW

Rotsos, C

English

Despite network monitoring and testing being critical for computer networks, current solutions are both extremely expensive and inflexible. This demo presents OSNT (www.osnt.org), a community-driven, high-performance, open-source traffic generator and capture system built on top of the NetFPGA-10G board which enables flexible network testing. The platform supports full line-rate traffic generation regardless of packet size across the four card ports, packet capture filtering and packet thinning in hardware and sub-msec time precision in traffic generation and capture, corrected using an external GPS device. Furthermore, it provides a software APIs to test the dataplane performance of multi-10G switches, providing a starting point for a number of different test cases. OSNT flexibility is further demonstrated through the OFLOPS-turbo platform: an integration of OSNT with the OFLOPS OpenFlow switch performance evaluation platform, enabling control and data plane evaluation of 10G switches. This demo showcases the applicability of the OSNT platform to evaluate the performance of legacy and OpenFlow-enabled networking devices, and demonstrates it using commercial switches.</jats:p

Gianni Antichi

Charalampos Rotsos

Andrew W. Moore

Crossref

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review

Enabling Performance Evaluation Beyond 10 Gbps

Apollo (Cambridge)

Enabling Performance Evaluation Beyond 10 GbpsGianni AntichiUniversity of Cambridgegianni.antichi@cl.cam.ac.ukCharalampos RotsosLancaster Universityc.rotsos@lancaster.ac.ukAndrew W. MooreUniversity of Cambridgeandrew.moore@cl.cam.ac.ukABSTRACTDespite network monitoring and testing being critical forcomputer networks, current solutions are both extremely ex-pensive and inflexible.This demo presents OSNT (www.osnt.org), a community-driven, high-performance, open-source traffic generator andcapture system built on top of the NetFPGA-10G boardwhich enables flexible network testing. The platform sup-ports full line-rate traffic generation regardless of packetsize across the four card ports, packet capture filtering andpacket thinning in hardware and sub-µsec time precisionin traffic generation and capture, corrected using an exter-nal GPS device. Furthermore, it provides a software APIsto test the dataplane performance of multi-10G switches,providing a starting point for a number of different testcases. OSNT flexibility is further demonstrated throughthe OFLOPS-turbo platform: an integration of OSNT withthe OFLOPS OpenFlow switch performance evaluation plat-form, enabling control and data plane evaluation of 10G swi-tches. This demo showcases the applicability of the OSNTplatform to evaluate the performance of legacy and OpenFlow-enabled networking devices, and demonstrates it using com-mercial switches.CCS Concepts•Networks→Network performance analysis; Networkmeasurement; Network performance modeling; Network ex-perimentation; •Hardware → Hardware accelerators; Net-working hardware;KeywordsNetwork Testing; OpenFlow; SDN; High-Performance; OSNT;NetFPGA1. INTRODUCTIONComputer networks are the hallmark of 21st Century so-ciety and underpin virtually all infrastructure in the mod-Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal orclassroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributedfor profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citationon the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored.For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s).SIGCOMM ’15 August 17-21, 2015, London, United Kingdomc© 2020 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-3542-3/15/08.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2785956.2790036ern world. Consequently, society relies on the correct op-eration of these networks. To make networks more reli-able, enormous resources are poured into all phases of thenetwork-equipment lifecycle. The process starts early in thedesign phase when simulation is used to verify the correct-ness of a design, and continues through manufacturing andperhaps months of rigorously trials. With a multitude ofInternet RFCs and hundreds of IEEE standards, a typi-cal piece of networking equipment undergoes hundreds ofconformance tests before being deployed. Finally, when de-ployed in a production network, the equipment is tested reg-ularly. Throughout the process, a relentless battery of testsand measurement help ensure the correct operation of theequipment. This has led to a multi-billion dollar industryin network test equipment giving rise to companies such asIxia, Spirent, Fluke, and Emulex/Endace among others.Figure 1: NetFPGA: the enabling platform of OSNTHowever, such equipment has evolved with a number ofundesirable characteristics: commonly closed and propri-etary systems with limited flexibility well outside the reachof most universities and research laboratories. Researchersand educators would also like to use test equipment to under-stand current networks and when prototyping new ideas. Wetherefore built the Open Source Network Tester (OSNT [1]),primarily for the research and teaching community. The firstprototype has been conceived on top of NetFPGA-10G plat-form 1 – an open source hardware platform supporting fullline-rate across the four 10G ethernet ports.OSNT provides two primary distinct functionalities: traf-fic generation and monitor. The OSNT traffic monitor sub-system provides high–precision inbound timestamping witha loss-limited path that gets (a subset of) captured packetsinto the host for further processing. The design associatespackets with a 64-bit timestamp on receipt by the MACmodule, thus minimising queueing noise. The timestampresolution is 6.25 nsec with clock drift and phase coordina-tion maintained by a GPS input. In addition, the traffic1www.netfpga.orgcapture functionality provides wildcard-enabled packet fil-ters and packet cutting and hashing in hardware. The OSNTtraffic generation subsystem provides a PCAP replay func-tion with a tuneable per–packet inter–departure time. Thetraffic generator has an accurate timestamping mechanism,located just before the transmit 10GbE MAC. The mech-anism, identical to the one used in the traffic monitoringunit, is used for timing-related network measurements, suchas latency and jitter. When enabled, the timestamp is em-bedded within the packet at a preconfigured location andcan be extracted at the receiver as required.The OSNT platform provides a simple and programmer-friendly API to control the traffic generation and monitoringfunctionality of the OSNT design, enabling the realisationof high precision and throughput measurement tests in soft-ware. OFLOPS-turbo is an holistic OpenFlow switch evalu-ation framework which takes advantage of the OSNT high-precision measurement capabilities. Using OFLOPS-turbousers can develop measurement modules which can accessinformation from multiple measurement channels (data andcontrol plane and SNMP) and measure the impact of theswitch OpenFlow implementation in data plane performancewith high precision.OSNT is a highly flexible and function-rich framework,which provides the building blocks for the realisation of awide range of network test scenarios. By providing an open-source solution we invite everyone from the community toaudit (and improve) our implementation as well as adapt itto their needs. We believe that, as an open-source commu-nity grows, a low-cost open-source network tester will alsoprove valuable to the networking industry. We also envisagethe enabling of new testing and validation deployments thatare simply financially impractical using commercial testers.Such deployments may see the use of hundreds or thousandsof testers, offering previously unobtainable insights and un-derstanding.2. DEMONSTRATION DESCRIPTIONThe first part of the demo showcases OSNT and how theoriginal implementation can be used to evaluate the perfor-mance of multi-10G legacy switches. The second part of thedemo showcases how OSNT can be improved and adaptedto different needs. In particular, how the OSNT APIs canbe used in order to develop a testing framework to evalu-ate the performance of multi-10G OpenFlow-enabled swi-tches. Specifically, we present OFLOPS-Turbo [2]: an effortto enhance the measurement capabilities of the OFLOPS [3]switch evaluation framework with support for the emergingprotocol requirement.Part I: Legacy Switch testing.This part of the demo showcases OSNT main function-alities and how to exploit them to accurately measure thepacket-processing latency of a legacy switch under differentload conditions. OSNT consists of a software driver sup-porting command-line and graphic-user interfaces (CLI andGUI), traffic generators and monitors modules. Users cangenerate traffic at a finely-controllled rate up to 10Gbps perport, and capture high-resolution timestamped packets toevaluate the achievable bandwidth and latency of a networkdevice. Two OSNT ports will be connected to the testedswitch. One of the ports will be used to generate traffic atvariable rates with the transmission timestamp embeddedin each packet, while the other port will be used to cap-ture pakets after they traverse the switch. Packets will bereceived by a userspace application with transmission andcapture timestamps and the application will accurate esti-mate the switching latency.Figure 2: The proposed demo scenarioPart II: OpenFlow Switch testing.This part of the demo will showcase the ability to lever-age the traffic generation and monitoring capabilities of theOSNT platform in software and implement high precisionevaluations of a switch control plane functionality. Specifi-cally, we will setup an instance of the OFLOPS-turbo frame-work on a host and run multiple measurement tests againsta production OpenFlow switch. OFLOPS-turbo implementsnumerous baseline measurement scenarios that target the el-ementary OpenFlow protocol interactions. During the demowe will focus on a test which measures the latency to mod-ify the entries of the switch flow table through control anddata plane measurements, using the topology presented inFigure 2. Through the conducted measurements, we willelaborate on the impact of the control plane implementa-tion on the network performance, as well as on forwardingconsistency during large flow table updates.AcknowledgementsWe thank the NetFPGA team and community. This projectis jointly supported by the EPSRC INTERNET ProjectEP/H040536/1, the EPSRC TOUCAN project EP/L020009/1and by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and in-novation programme under the ENDEAVOUR project (grantagreement 644960).3. REFERENCES[1] Antichi, G., Shahbaz, M., Geng, Y., Zilberman,N., Covington, A., Bruyere, M., McKeown, N.,Feamster, N., Felderman, B., Blott, M., Moore,A., and Owezarski, P. OSNT: Open Source NetworkTester. IEEE Network Special issue on Open Source forNetworking: Tools and Applications (2014).[2] Rotsos, C., Antichi, G., Bruyere, M., Owezarski,P., and Moore, A. W. OFLOPS-Turbo: Testing theNext-Generation OpenFlow Switch. In ICC (2015),IEEE.[3] Rotsos, C., Sarrar, N., Uhlig, S., Sherwood, R.,and Moore, A. OFLOPS: An open framework forOpenFlow switch evaluation. In PAM (2012).

Enabling Performance Evaluation beyond 10 Gbps

Despite network monitoring and testing being critical for computer networks, current solutions are both extremely expensive and inflexible. This demo presents OSNT (www.osnt.org), a community-driven, high-performance, open-source traffic generator and capture system built on top of the NetFPGA-10G board which enables flexible network testing. The platform supports full line-rate traffic generation regardless of packet size across the four card ports, packet capture filtering and packet thinning in hardware and sub-msec time precision in traffic generation and capture, corrected using an external GPS device. Furthermore, it provides a software APIs to test the dataplane performance of multi-10G switches, providing a starting point for a number of different test cases. OSNT flexibility is further demonstrated through the OFLOPS-turbo platform: an integration of OSNT with the OFLOPS OpenFlow switch performance evaluation platform, enabling control and data plane evaluation of 10G switches. This demo showcases the applicability of the OSNT platform to evaluate the performance of legacy and OpenFlow-enabled networking devices, and demonstrates it using commercial switches.We thank the NetFPGA team and community. This project is jointly supported by the EPSRC INTERNET Project EP/H040536/1, the EPSRC TOUCAN project EP/L020009/1 and by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the ENDEAVOUR project (grant agreement 644960).This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from ACM via http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2785956.279003

Antichi, Gianni

Rotsos, Charalampos

Moore, Andrew W

Enabling Performance Evaluation Beyond 10 GbpsGianni AntichiUniversity of Cambridgegianni.antichi@cl.cam.ac.ukCharalampos RotsosLancaster Universityc.rotsos@lancaster.ac.ukAndrew W. MooreUniversity of Cambridgeandrew.moore@cl.cam.ac.ukABSTRACTDespite network monitoring and testing being critical forcomputer networks, current solutions are both extremely ex-pensive and inflexible.This demo presents OSNT (www.osnt.org), a community-driven, high-performance, open-source traffic generator andcapture system built on top of the NetFPGA-10G board whichenables flexible network testing. The platform supports fullline-rate traffic generation regardless of packet size acrossthe four card ports, packet capture filtering and packet thin-ning in hardware and sub-µsec time precision in traffic gen-eration and capture, corrected using an external GPS device.Furthermore, it provides a software APIs to test the data-plane performance of multi-10G switches, providing a start-ing point for a number of different test cases. OSNT flex-ibility is further demonstrated through the OFLOPS-turboplatform: an integration of OSNT with the OFLOPS Open-Flow switch performance evaluation platform, enabling con-trol and data plane evaluation of 10G switches. This demoshowcases the applicability of the OSNT platform to eval-uate the performance of legacy and OpenFlow-enabled net-working devices, and demonstrates it using commercial swi-tches.KeywordsNetwork Testing; OpenFlow; SDN; High-Performance;OSNT; NetFPGA1. INTRODUCTIONComputer networks are the hallmark of 21st Centurysociety and underpin virtually all infrastructure in themodern world. Consequently, society relies on the cor-rect operation of these networks. To make networksmore reliable, enormous resources are poured into allphases of the network-equipment lifecycle. The pro-cess starts early in the design phase when simulationis used to verify the correctness of a design, and con-tinues through manufacturing and perhaps months ofrigorously trials. With a multitude of Internet RFCsand hundreds of IEEE standards, a typical piece of net-working equipment undergoes hundreds of conformancetests before being deployed. Finally, when deployed in aproduction network, the equipment is tested regularly.Throughout the process, a relentless battery of testsand measurement help ensure the correct operation ofthe equipment. This has led to a multi-billion dollarindustry in network test equipment giving rise to com-panies such as Ixia, Spirent, Fluke, and Emulex/Endaceamong others.Figure 1: NetFPGA: the enabling platform ofOSNTHowever, such equipment has evolved with a num-ber of undesirable characteristics: commonly closed andproprietary systems with limited flexibility well outsidethe reach of most universities and research laboratories.Researchers and educators would also like to use testequipment to understand current networks and whenprototyping new ideas. We therefore built the OpenSource Network Tester (OSNT [1]), primarily for theresearch and teaching community. The first prototypehas been conceived on top of NetFPGA-10G platform 1– an open source hardware platform supporting full line-rate across the four 10G ethernet ports.OSNT provides two primary distinct functionalities:traffic generation and monitor. The OSNT traffic mon-itor subsystem provides high–precision inbound times-tamping with a loss-limited path that gets (a subsetof) captured packets into the host for further process-ing. The design associates packets with a 64-bit times-tamp on receipt by the MAC module, thus minimisingqueueing noise. The timestamp resolution is 6.25 nsecwith clock drift and phase coordination maintained by aGPS input. In addition, the traffic capture functional-ity provides wildcard-enabled packet filters and packet1www.netfpga.org1cutting and hashing in hardware. The OSNT trafficgeneration subsystem provides a PCAP replay functionwith a tuneable per–packet inter–departure time. Thetraffic generator has an accurate timestamping mech-anism, located just before the transmit 10GbE MAC.The mechanism, identical to the one used in the traf-fic monitoring unit, is used for timing-related networkmeasurements, such as latency and jitter. When en-abled, the timestamp is embedded within the packet ata preconfigured location and can be extracted at thereceiver as required.The OSNT platform provides a simple and programmer-friendly API to control the traffic generation and mon-itoring functionality of the OSNT design, enabling therealisation of high precision and throughput measure-ment tests in software. OFLOPS-turbo is an holisticOpenFlow switch evaluation framework which takes ad-vantage of the OSNT high-precision measurement capa-bilities. Using OFLOPS-turbo users can develop mea-surement modules which can access information frommultiple measurement channels (data and control planeand SNMP) and measure the impact of the switch Open-Flow implementation in data plane performance withhigh precision.OSNT is a highly flexible and function-rich frame-work, which provides the building blocks for the reali-sation of a wide range of network test scenarios. By pro-viding an open-source solution we invite everyone fromthe community to audit (and improve) our implementa-tion as well as adapt it to their needs. We believe that,as an open-source community grows, a low-cost open-source network tester will also prove valuable to thenetworking industry. We also envisage the enabling ofnew testing and validation deployments that are simplyfinancially impractical using commercial testers. Suchdeployments may see the use of hundreds or thousandsof testers, offering previously unobtainable insights andunderstanding.2. DEMONSTRATION DESCRIPTIONThe first part of the demo showcases OSNT and howthe original implementation can be used to evaluate theperformance of multi-10G legacy switches. The secondpart of the demo showcases how OSNT can be improvedand adapted to different needs. In particular, how theOSNT APIs can be used in order to develop a testingframework to evaluate the performance of multi-10GOpenFlow-enabled switches. Specifically, we presentOFLOPS-Turbo [2]: an effort to enhance the measure-ment capabilities of the OFLOPS [3] switch evaluationframework with support for the emerging protocol re-quirement.Part I: Legacy Switch testing.This part of the demo showcases OSNT main func-tionalities and how to exploit them to accurately mea-sure the packet-processing latency of a legacy switchunder different load conditions. OSNT consists of asoftware driver supporting command-line and graphic-user interfaces (CLI and GUI), traffic generators andmonitors modules. Users can generate traffic at a finely-controllled rate up to 10Gbps per port, and capturehigh-resolution timestamped packets to evaluate the achiev-able bandwidth and latency of a network device. TwoOSNT ports will be connected to the tested switch.One of the ports will be used to generate traffic at vari-able rates with the transmission timestamp embeddedin each packet, while the other port will be used to cap-ture pakets after they traverse the switch. Packets willbe received by a userspace application with transmis-sion and capture timestamps and the application willaccurate estimate the switching latency.Figure 2: The proposed demo scenarioPart II: OpenFlow Switch testing.This part of the demo will showcase the ability toleverage the traffic generation and monitoring capabil-ities of the OSNT platform in software and implementhigh precision evaluations of a switch control plane func-tionality. Specifically, we will setup an instance of theOFLOPS-turbo framework on a host and run multi-ple measurement tests against a production OpenFlowswitch. OFLOPS-turbo implements numerous baselinemeasurement scenarios that target the elementary Open-Flow protocol interactions. During the demo we willfocus on a test which measures the latency to modifythe entries of the switch flow table through control anddata plane measurements, using the topology presentedin Figure 2. Through the conducted measurements, wewill elaborate on the impact of the control plane imple-mentation on the network performance, as well as onforwarding consistency during large flow table updates.AcknowledgementsWe thank the NetFPGA team and community. Thisproject is jointly supported by the EPSRC INTERNETProject EP/H040536/1, the EPSRC TOUCAN projectEP/L020009/1 and by the European Union’s Horizon2020 research and innovation programme under the EN-2DEAVOUR project (grant agreement 644960).3. REFERENCES[1] Antichi, G., Shahbaz, M., Geng, Y.,Zilberman, N., Covington, A., Bruyere, M.,McKeown, N., Feamster, N., Felderman,B., Blott, M., Moore, A., and Owezarski,P. OSNT: Open Source Network Tester. IEEENetwork Special issue on Open Source forNetworking: Tools and Applications (2014).[2] Rotsos, C., Antichi, G., Bruyere, M.,Owezarski, P., and Moore, A. W.OFLOPS-Turbo: Testing the Next-GenerationOpenFlow Switch. In ICC (2015), IEEE.[3] Rotsos, C., Sarrar, N., Uhlig, S.,Sherwood, R., and Moore, A. OFLOPS: Anopen framework for OpenFlow switch evaluation.In PAM (2012).3

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Enabling Performance Evaluation beyond 10 Gbps

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