Real-time Monitoring of Packet Processing Time for Virtual Network Functions

By enabling the deployment of softwarelized network functions on commodity servers, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) brings many benefits such as rapid development and deployment, simplicity and flexibility in network operations and management. Monitoring the performance characteristics of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs), such as packet processing time, is crucial to achieving maximum benefit from NFV. In this paper, we present Packer Processing Time Monitoring (PPTMon) - a solution for real-time and lightweight VNF packet processing time monitoring. PPTMon embeds timestamp information directly into the packets. PPTMon is implemented using extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) - a new Linux framework that allows high-speed packet processing. Our experiments showed that PPTMon can monitor VNFs with high accuracy and low performance overhead.