Ares: A Scalable High-Performance Passive Measurement Tool Using a Multicore System

Abstract

Network measurement tools must support the collection of fine-grain flow statistics and scale well to the increasing line rates. However, conventional network measurement software tools are inadequate in high-speed network at the current scale. In this paper, we present Ares, a scalable high-performance passive network measurement tool to collect accurate per-flow metrics. Ares is built on a multicore platform, consisting of an effective hierarchical core assignment strategy, an efficient hash table for keeping flow statistics, a novel lockless flow statistics management scheme, as well as cache friendly prefetching. Our extensive performance evaluation shows that Ares brings about 19x speedup for 64-byte packets over existing approaches and can sustain up to a line rate of 100Gbps, while delivering the same level of fine-grained flow metrics.