Time-stamping accuracy in virtualized environments

The swift acceptance and the widespread use of virtual environments has substantially increased the stress on networks as each of the operating systems running in parallel sends out packets over the same network. As an increased number of packets traverse a network, the importance to continuously monitor whether the network is providing satisfactory service has increased. The metrics for such analyses includes delay, jitter, packet loss and available path capacity. The basic parameter required to quantify these metrics is the time-stamping values of the packets. The purpose of this research work is to characterize the impact of virtualization on a PC's time-stamping process. Operating system virtualization is employed where the time-stamping is done by the operating system kernel. CPU load and packet generating parameters are varied in order to study about the effect of virtualization on the time-stamping process under different operating conditions.