English

On Measuring Available Capacity in High-speed Cloud Networks

Networking and Internet Architecture 2025-02-03 v1 Operating Systems

Abstract

Measurement of available path capacity with high accuracy over high-speed links deployed in cloud and transport networks is vital for performance assessment and traffic engineering. Methods for measuring the available path capacity rely on sending and receiving time stamped probe packets. A requirement for accurate estimates of the available path capacity is the ability to generate probe packets at a desired rate and also time stamping with high precision and accuracy. This is challenging especially for measurement systems deployed using general purpose hardware. To touch upon the challenge this paper describes and evaluates four approaches for sending and receiving probe packets in high-speed networks (10+ Gbps). The evaluation shows that the baseline approach, based on the native UDP socket, is suitable for available path capacity measurements over links with capacities up to 2.5 Gbps. For higher capacities we show that an implementation based on Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) gives good results up to 10 Gbps.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2501.19167,
  title  = {On Measuring Available Capacity in High-speed Cloud Networks},
  author = {Ganapathy Raman Madanagopal and Christofer Flinta and Andreas Johnsson and Farnaz Moradi and Daniel Turull},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.19167},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

6 Pages including reference. 3 figures, 2 tables with detailed experiements

R2 v1 2026-06-28T21:27:40.708Z