Introducing scalability in network measurement: toward 10 Gbps with commodity hardware

The capacity of today's network links, along with the heterogeneity of their traffic, is rapidly growing, more than the workstation’s processing power. This makes the task of measuring traffic more problematic every day, especially when off-the-shelf hardware is used. A general solution adopted by the computer industry to achieve better performance is to partition the processing among different computing units, exploiting the implicit or explicit parallelism available on today workstations. Parallelism is in fact growing in two dimensions: physical and logical CPUs (e.g. HyperThreading). Unfortunately, most network measurement systems are engineered to process data in a set of sequential tasks; thus, completely ignoring any form of parallelism provided by the hardware. This paper introduces a new approach to build high performance and scalable network measurement tools. It discusses the problem of dispatching packets to different processing entities and describes a technology a...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: IMC
• Authors: Loris Degioanni, Gianluca Varenni
• Keywords: IMC 2004, Network Measurement, Network Measurement Systems, Workstation’s Processing Power