Passive Delay Measurement for Fidelity Monitoring of Distributed Network Emulation

Emulation has become a popular approach for the validation and evaluation of network research. It provides researchers with a contained, customizable, and scalable testing environment, which can be easily packaged and published for potential readers to reproduce their results. However, as the network components are only virtual, emulation lacks the inherent realism of physical testbeds. In light of this, monitoring specific metrics of the emulated network has been proposed as a solution to mitigate to some degree inaccuracies caused by emulation. While this is not difficult to implement in a single-machine setting (e.g. with Mininet), monitoring is limited by the lack of time synchronization in scenarios where the emulation is distributed over multiple physical machines (e.g., Distrinet). In this paper we tackle the case of packet delay monitoring, to which we propose a methodology for passively measuring one-way delays with underlying assumptions about time synchronization, and round-trip delays otherwise. For an efficient implementation of our methodology, we propose an eBPF-based packet measurement tool that performs better than current packet sniffers under emulation-specific assumptions. We implement and evaluate our system in an open testbed and show that it can reach results within few microseconds of perfect accuracy and precision.