On time-stamp accuracy of passive monitoring in a container execution environment
Farnaz Moradi, Christofer Flinta, Andreas Johnsson, Cătălin Meiroşu · 2016
Passive monitoring of network performance parameters is experiencing a revival due to widespread adoption of virtualization and software-based implementation of network functions. Timestamping is one of the most challenging operations needed for passively monitoring network traffic performance parameters such as latency and jitter. We develop a setup whereby functions that monitor the network traffic are deployed in monitoring containers adjacently to, and interconnected through a virtual switch with the monitored Virtual Network Function instance. In this scenario, we evaluate the effects of container virtualization and virtual switch mirroring of traffic on the measurement of latency. The evaluation results indicate very low measurement errors (a few microseconds in our testbed) which are consistent over different measurement scenarios, thus validating the feasibility of this technique for passively monitoring latency.