January 31, 2014

Measuring with Multipath TCP

We often receive questions from students or engineers who start to use Multipath TCP about the measurement software that they can use to assess the performance of protocol. The best approach is often to use real traffic with real applications because this will correspond to the real use case for Multipath TCP. However, it is not always possible to deploy Multipath TCP on a large number of clients and servers to perform such experiments. During the last years, we’ve used several software tools to measure the performance of Multipath TCP :

  • ipref3 allows to measure the memory-to-memory throughput
  • netperf supports both memory-to-memory transfers and request/response types of transfers
  • ab the Apache HTTP server benchmarking tool allows to measure the performance of web servers such as apache
  • weighttp another web server benchmarking tool

There are other, more generic measurement tools that could also be useful for some types of measurements, but we do not have direct experience with them :

  • mgen from NRL is capable of generating various types of traffic patterns over UDP and TCP
  • D-ITG [Botta2012] allows to generate traffic according to some statistical properties. Also works above TCP.

If you’ve used other open-source software to measure Multipath TCP performance, feel free to add comments below so that we can update this page.

References

[Botta2012]
  1. Botta, A. Dainotti, A. Pescape, A tool for the generation of realistic network workload for emerging networking scenarios , Computer Networks (Elsevier), 2012, Volume 56, Issue 15, pp 3531-3547, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2012.02.019
Posted by Olivier Bonaventure
Filed under: software
Tags: software, measurements