Hiper-ping: Data plane based high performance packet generation bypassing kernel on ×86 based commodity systems

Abstract

Numbers of commodity hardware available today are capable of saturating Gigabit Ethernet networks. The key today is to identify the fact that the hardware is not the bottleneck when it comes to generating traffic workloads at high rates. There are not many reliable tools out in the market which could help in evaluating the security and performance of high speed networking devices using the commodity hardware. To address the problem of higher packet processing efficiency of commodity servers we have developed a tool called “Hiper-Ping”. We run Hiper-Ping on top of x86 based commodity hardware and highlight its performance for security auditing and testing of firewalls and networks. Hiper-Ping shows superior performance in terms of both the achieved throughput and the bitrate values, under all possible values of frame length. Using Hiper-Ping we were able to achieve a speed of 1.488 Million minimum sized packets per second on a commodity server equipped with a single Gigabit Ethernet interface.