EPM-SR: efficient performance measurement framework for KPIs to support segment routing over IPv6 Network

Segment Routing (SR) over IPv6 (SRv6 in short) is a promising solution to support advanced services, which is the instantiation of SR architecture for the IPv6 dataplane. The rapid development of the standardization and implementation for SRv6 is driving a critical need for accurate and scalable network performance measurement (PM) and monitoring techniques. There has been an emerging interest towards designing and enhancing PM for SRv6, however, it is still challenging to design a PM framework to produce accurate and real-time evaluations of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), while supporting software and hardware implementations of SRv6. In this paper, we provide an efficient PM solution for SRv6-enabled networks (termed as EPM-SR), considering both data plane and control plane aspects. EPM-SR provides accurate and real-time measurement of per-flow performance metrics, including packet delay, jitter and loss using two bits or less in the header of each packet. We have leveraged EPM-SR to validate the implementation of SRv6 behaviors in the Linux kernel and evaluate KPIs performance of the SRv6 implementation in both a simulation verification platform and a pressure testbed.