Paper Info
Title
PPTMon: Real-Time and Fine-Grained Packet Processing Time Monitoring in Virtual Network Functions
Abstract
By softwarizing the legacy network functions, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) allows rapid development and deployment of network services as well as simplicity and flexibility in network operations and management. Monitoring the performance characteristics of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs), particularly packet processing time, is important to ensure that VNFs are operating correctly with desired performance. This is especially crucial for low-latency network services. In this paper, we present Packet Processing Time Monitoring (PPTMon), a real-time, fine-grained, and end-to-end solution for VNF packet processing time monitoring. PPTMon can provide per-hop monitoring for a single VNF as well as end-to-end monitoring for multiple VNFs in a service function chain. PPTMon allows monitoring in both sampling and continuous fashions. Continuously monitoring every packet may greatly degrade the performance of the VNFs and generate a huge amount of monitoring data. PPTMon’s event-filtering algorithm effectively filters out non-important data and reduces the performance overhead. PPTMon processes packets in-stack by embedding timestamp information directly into the packets, thus further reducing the effect on the VNF performance. PPTMon is implemented on top of extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) – a Linux framework that allows high-speed packet processing. Our experiment results shows that PPTMon can monitor VNF packet processing time with high accuracy and low impact on performance.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1109/TNSM.2021.3102915
IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Real-time network monitoring,NFV,SFC,VNF monitoring,eBPF,measuring packet processing time
Journal
18
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
4
1932-4537
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.37
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Nguyen Van Tu1122.11
Yoo Jae Hyoung27419.35
James Won-Ki Hong3713122.26