DPDS: A DPDK-Based Packet Delayer and Spacer
For network emulation researchers and practitioners, DPDS provides a more accurate and high-throughput solution for adding varying packet delays, addressing limitations of existing tools.
The paper introduces DPDS, a DPDK-based packet delayer and spacer that uses adaptive delay correlation to add varying delays without causing packet reordering. DPDS achieves zero-loss throughputs of 95 Gbit/s for constant delay and 85 Gbit/s for varying delay with 3 ms jitter, outperforming NetEm and MoonEm.
In this paper we tackle the problem of adding varying delay to packets for link emulation. Naive approaches either add more delay than desired or cause packet reordering, both of which are undesirable. We develop adaptive delay correlation, which adds positively correlated delays to packets efficiently. It takes a mean delay and standard deviation (jitter) as input, as well as a half-life period to control the delay dynamics. We investigate the accuracy and dynamics of the resulting packet delays with and without bandwidth limitation. As a result we give a recommendation for the configuration of the half-life period. We implement adaptive delay correlation in a DPDK-based packet delayer and spacer (DPDS), investigate its performance on hardware, and compare it with the widely used link emulator NetEm and the recently developed DPDK-based emulator MoonEm. DPDS outperforms both of them with a zero-loss throughput of 95 Gbit/s for constant delay and, with spacing enabled, 85 Gbit/s for varying delay with 3 ms jitter. Further, DPDS supports packet reordering with zero-loss throughputs of 73 Gbit/s and 58 Gbit/s for constant and varying delay, respectively, as well as policing and two packet loss models.