PerfTrace: A New Multi-metric Network Performance Monitoring Tool

Abstract

We present PerfTrace, an end-to-end tool for efficient, real-time, and multi-metric network performance monitoring. PerfTrace provides a high integration of different existing measurement functions, supporting the measurement of essential metrics such as latency, jitter, packet loss, and available bandwidth. More importantly, innovative schemes and algorithms are proposed to address the weaknesses of existing tools.After conducting comprehensive evaluations, we find that (i) PerfTrace measures one-way and two-way latency, jitter, and packet loss ∼9.4× faster and ∼3.6× more data-efficiently; (ii) PerfTrace measures available bandwidth in our testbed with minimal mean relative error (5.22%), outperforming all the tools compared (ranging from 8.17% to 37.24%). Meanwhile, PerfTrace consumes a more constant percentage of bandwidth resources than other tools when monitoring available bandwidth. PerfTrace’s data overhead is always only about 1/600 of the total bandwidth for a measurement frequency once per minute.