Traffic Control For Low Latency and High Performance Systems

Author: Noa Zilberman

Introduction

Testing, benchmarking and measuring high performance systems within controlled environment is a hard task. Being able to do so for high-performance systems, when studying aspects of cloud computing and data center environments is even more challenging. Existing software tools such as Dummynet and NetEm can not support the scale of throughput or latency required in today's systems.
We introduce the next generation of traffic control tools for academic research: a hardware based solution, providing support both for traffic control and traffic monitoring at line rate.

Features List

General features:

• Open source
• Hardware based
• Implemented and tested on NetFPGA-SUME
• Full line rate

Latency Control:

• Static latency control
• Variable latency control
• Predefined latency distributions
• User defined latency distributions
• Supports full line rate
• Nanoseconds granularity

Throughput control:

• Rate control
• Burst control

Monitoring:

• Line rate
• Preprocessed in hardware
• Bandwidth and packet rate monitoring
• Packet statistics
• Per-port statistics
• Protocol statistics
• User defined monitoring

Use Cases

"Where Has My Time Gone?", In PAM 2017.
More use cases currently under submission - please check back soon!