SRPerf: A Performance Evaluation Framework for IPv6 Segment Routing

Segment Routing (SR) is a form of loose source routing. It provides the ability to include a list of instructions, called segments, in the packet header. The SR architecture has been first implemented with the MPLS (SR-MPLS) data plane and then, quite recently, with the IPv6 data plane (SRv6). SRv6 is a promising solution to support advanced services such as Traffic Engineering, Service Function Chaining and Virtual Private Networks. The SRv6 data plane is supported in many different software forwarding engines including the Linux kernel and the Vector Packet Processor (VPP), as well as in hardware devices. In this article, we present SRPerf, a performance evaluation framework for software and hardware implementations of SRv6. SRPerf is able to perform different benchmarking tests such as throughput and latency. The architecture of SRPerf can be easily extended to support new benchmarking methodologies as well as different SRv6 implementations. We have used SRPerf to evaluate the performance of two SRv6 implementations: Linux kernel and VPP. SRPerf is a valuable tool in the context of modern forwarding engines where new features can be added at fast pace, as it helps experimenters to validate their work. In this work, we have leveraged SRPerf to validate the implementation of some SRv6 behaviors in the Linux kernel and we have discovered and fixed some implementation flaws, making available the fixed code.