NetWatch: End-to-End Network Performance Measurement as a Service for Cloud

Abstract

Accurate and comprehensive end-to-end network performance measurement is critical for the automatic troubleshooting and optimized provision of various services in Cloud. However, cloud providers and tenants still rely on rudimentary and separate tools for end-to-end performance measurement, which are inflexible, tedious, and error-prone. In this paper, we present NetWatch, a system that provides measurement as a service through open APIs for both cloud providers and tenants to measure end-to-end performance on-demand. In this system, measurement requests are first delivered to NetWatch Controller by open APIs, which transforms the request to configure specific Probes to fulfill the requests by active measurement. We make delicate design choices and address several challenges to enable NetWatch offering accurate and low-overhead measurement service for multiple users simultaneously and efficiently. A prototype implementation and experiments with diverse network settings link and traffic demonstrate that NetWatch can support flexible and accurate measurement of end-to-end network performance with small overhead.