Passive Monitoring of Network Latency at High Line Rates
Abstract: Network latency plays a crucial role for many applications and their perceived quality of experience. With an increasing focus on high network speeds and real time, interactive applications relying on reliable and low latency, the ability to effectively monitor latency is becoming more important than ever. While many available tools rely on active monitoring, this approach relies on traffic injection in the network, which can be a source of latency in itself and have a negative overall network performance impact. This paper presents evolved Passive Ping (ePPing), a tool that leverages eBPF to passively monitor latency of existing network traffic. Preliminary evaluation shows that ePPing delivers RTT reports more reliably and at a lower overhead than other state-of-the-art tools, such as PPing.