High-performance packet processing and measurements

Networks and network architectures are constantly evolving, manifesting in new developments such as SDN, P4, and 400G Ethernet. These novel paradigms and technologies require network researchers to investigate and to adapt their measurement facilities. We present two tools which can foster this process. The first tool, pos, supports a fully automated workflow for performing and evaluating network experiments. One of its key features is the testbed orchestration to maintain and recreate a specified network test environment gaining reproducible experiment results. The second tool, libmoon, is a user-friendly userspace packet processing framework based on DPDK. Among many other projects, libmoon powers MoonGen, a dedicated packet generator in broad use by the community. MoonGen's hardware-supported generation and measurement capabilities are central to our network experiments to reliably recreate measurements. Further, a survey of scientific publications and applications presents projects based on both libmoon and Moon-Gen. We argue that combining pos and libmoon/MoonGen creates an ideal platform for network experiments. This platform offers an affordable price, high flexibility, ease of use and generation of reproducible experiments.