A tool for measuring available network bandwidth in the cloud

Abstract: Measurement of available path capacity with high accuracy over high-speed linksdeployed in cloud and transport backbones is vital for Internet Service Providers(ISP) and for various network applications to know how congested the different linksare in a network and also to do traffic engineering efficiently. State-of-the-art activeprobing method BART (Bandwidth Available in Real-Time) measures the availablepath capacity by injecting the timestamped measurement packets into the network.Active probing measurement technique deeply relies on the ability to generate probepackets at required rate and time-stamped with high precision. While dealing withhigh-speed links (10+ Gbps) links, it is a challenging task for the measurementsystem to generate and time stamp the probe packets within few nano-seconds.This thesis focus on finding a suitable architecture and an optimized algorithmto send and receive measurement packets over high-speed links. Five differentarchitectures: Native UDP sockets, LibPcap, Loadable Kernel Modules, Netmap andData Plane Development Kit (DPDK) are investigated for fast packets processing inLinux systems. Also, the optimized algorithm(s) that suits the specific architecturefor sending and receiving measurement packets at various rates are designed. Theperformance metrics obtained from the measurement systems tested against variousrates and burst size using different architectures are compared and the observationsare discussed and analysed in detail to find the suitable architecture.