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Abstract
We have designed and implemented a system that
permits the measurement of network Quality of Service
(QoS) parameters. This system allows us to objectively
evaluate the requirements of network applications for
delivering user acceptable quality. We use FastEthernet taps
to monitor full-duplex traffic and programmable network
interface cards to extract all the information needed to
compute the network QoS parameters: latency, jitter, packet
loss and throughput. The measurement system makes use of
a global clock to synchronize the time measurements in
different points of the network.
We have employed this system to evaluate the
performance of several network devices and study the
behaviour of real network applications, such as file transfer
and voice over IP. For these applications user perceived
quality (UPQ) metrics have been defined in order to assess
their QoS requirements. Since we measure simultaneously
network QoS and application UPQ, we are able to correlate
them. Determining application requirements has two main
uses: (i) to predict UPQ for an application running over a
given network based on the corresponding measured QoS
parameters and understand the causes of application failure;
(ii) to design/configure networks that provide the necessary
conditions so that an application will run with a desired
UPQ level.
1 INTRODUCTION
Quality of Service (QoS) has become more widely
recognised as an important issue since network applications
with real-time requirements have started to spread on a
larger scale. At the moment there are not many systems able
to correlate the QoS provisioned by networks with the user
perceived quality (UPQ) for specific applications, such as
file transfer or voice over IP (VoIP).
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Alteon UTP NICs, two for each tap, in order to mirror fullduplex traffic. From each packet all the information required
in order to compute the network QoS parameters is extracted
and stored in the local memory as packet descriptors. The
host PCs, which control the programmable NICs,
periodically collect this information and store it in descriptor
files. This data is then used to compute off-line the
following network QoS parameters: latency and jitter,
packet loss and throughput. We can calculate instantaneous
or average values, and various histograms.
2 SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
Figure 1 shows the system we have designed in a
regular test setup. We use two FastEthernet taps to mirror
the traffic on the link between two Linux PCs that run
network applications. Traffic is fed into four programmable
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NICs (see Section 2.3). Taps are the best solution to monitor
full-duplex links. Using the port mirroring option on
switches has the disadvantage of introducing delays that
depend on the load. Hubs are another possibility, but they do
not allow full duplex monitoring due to the collisions that
may appear between traffic in the two directions.
The NIST Net network emulator [24] is a freeware tool
that dynamically emulates network conditions. This
emulator is implemented as a kernel module that makes use
of a real-time clock module in order to attain higher
accuracy. The emulator allows controlled, reproducible
experiments with applications that are network performance
sensitive or adaptive. By operating at IP level, NIST Net can
emulate the end-to-end performance characteristics imposed
by various network situations.
Other components we have used are programmable
Alteon Fast/Gigabit Ethernet NICs. The host PC
communicates with the NIC through a shared memory
segment and control structures. The NIC performs all the
necessary Ethernet MAC and PHY layer processing. We
programmed these NICs to monitor 100 Mbps links,
operating at full speed. The NIC has a 1 MB memory, which
is used to store the running software and packet descriptors
extracted from the mirrored traffic.
G=
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B min [bytes ]
,
B [bytes ]
(1)
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TTP =
Tth [ s]
B [bytes]
,
= min
T [ s] L [bps] T [ s]
3 SYSTEM EVALUATION
Before starting our experiments we evaluated our QoS
measurement system in the simplified setup from Figure 2.
Since the taps are connected to each other, the time spent by
a packet between the two taps is constant. We measured the
difference between the arrival times at the two Host PCs.
Our results show the variation displayed in Figure 3.
(2)
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4 EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
We have selected two network applications that are
extensively used in LANs, as well as over the Internet. They
have different network behaviour:
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10 kB
0.0219
0.0029
100 kB
0.1650
0.0141
1MB
0.8221
0.0559
10MB
0.8919
0.0791
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4.2 VoIP
VoIP is one of the most widely used interactive network
applications. The bandwidth requirements of speech transmission are low (64 kbps voice data maximum), but
interactivity implies high sensitivity to delay and jitter. We
havent studied the influence of one-way delay on VoIP
UPQ because these requirements are generally known [17],
[25]: a mouth-to-ear delay of up to 150 ms gives good interactivity, a delay between 150 and 400 ms is acceptable, and
delays higher than 400 ms are unacceptable. Therefore we
performed only uni-directional tests, which focus on the
perceived quality of the speech itself depending on packet
loss and jitter.
For our tests we used a freeware VoIP application. The
results presented below are obtained with the G.711
encoding [12] (64 kbps, -law encoding). The application
doesnt do silence suppression, reorder out-of-order packets
or perform packet loss concealment. When using RTP the
length of audio data per packet is of 40 ms. We used a
dejittering buffer of 80 ms, that is equivalent to two VoIP
packets. We present here a study of the region with loss
rates between 0 and 10% and average jitter values ranging
from 0 to 75 ms, since quality becomes unacceptable at
these boundaries already. Five series of tests were run to
collect the data used for the results shown below. Figure 6
presents a 3D plot of the PESQ score versus loss rate and
average jitter. Figures 7 and 8 show cross-sections of the 3D
surface along loss and jitter axes.
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5 CONCLUSIONS
References
6 FUTURE WORK
In the near future we shall perform more tests with
VoIP using different codecs. We also plan to quantify the
influence on UPQ of dejittering buffer sizes, reordering
out-of-order packets and possibly packet loss concealment.
The next step will be to study the interaction between
several traffic flows sharing the same link and having the
same, or different, network behaviour elastic or inelastic.
These realistic conditions will help us generalize the
conclusions we have drawn so far for separate applications.
We also plan to extend our area of interest to other
network applications, such as web browsing, video
streaming and teleconferencing, for which UPQ is of
considerable importance.
Acknowledgments
We wish to thank professor Vasile Buzuloiu for his
continuous feedback and invaluable suggestions. Brian
Martin, Catalin Meirosu and Jamie Lokier had a significant
contribution to the early development of the clock
synchronization system and pioneered Alteon NIC reprogramming.
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