research-article

Public Access

Measuring TCP Round-Trip Time in the Data Plane

Authors:

Jennifer RexfordAuthors Info & Claims

SPIN '20: Proceedings of the Workshop on Secure Programmable Network Infrastructure

Pages 35 - 41

https://doi.org/10.1145/3405669.3405823

Published: 10 August 2020 Publication History

Abstract

We present a data-plane algorithm that passively and continuously monitors the Round-Trip Time of TCP traffic, by matching data packets with their associated acknowledgments and calculating a time difference. Compared with traditional measurement systems based on active probing or measuring only SYN/ACK packets, our algorithm passively produces many samples for long-running connections. This enables network operators to observe abnormal RTT increases, which signal possible security or performance issues in the network, in real-time. To satisfy the stringent memory size and access constraints of programmable switches, our algorithm uses a multi-stage hash table data structure to maintain records for in-flight packets; the records not receiving their acknowledgments are lazily expired and overwritten. We implement our algorithm on a Barefoot Tofino programmable switch. Evaluation using a real-world traffic trace from a 10 Gbps campus network link demonstrates that our solution can accurately capture 99% of available RTT samples, using only 4 MB of data-plane memory.

References

[1]

Jay Aikat, Jasleen Kaur, F Donelson Smith, and Kevin Jeffay. 2003. Variability in TCP round-trip times. In ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference. 279--284.

Digital Library

[2]

Ran Ben-Basat, Xiaoqi Chen, Gil Einziger, and Ori Rottenstreich. 2018. Efficient Measurement on Programmable Switches Using Probabilistic Recirculation. In IEEE ICNP. 313--323.

[3]

Henry Birge-Lee, Liang Wang, Jennifer Rexford, and Prateek Mittal. 2019. SICO: Surgical Interception Attacks by Manipulating BGP Communities. In ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security.

Digital Library

[4]

Francesco Bronzino, Paul Schmitt, Sara Ayoubi, Guilherme Martins, Renata Teixeira, and Nick Feamster. 2020. Inferring Streaming Video Quality from Encrypted Traffic: Practical Models and Deployment Experience. ACM SIGMETRICS (2020).

[5]

Gaetano Carlucci, Luca De Cicco, and Saverio Mascolo. 2015. HTTP over UDP: an Experimental Investigation of QUIC. In ACM Symposium on Applied Computing. 609--614.

Digital Library

[6]

Graham Cormode and S. Muthukrishnan. 2005. An improved data stream summary: The Count-Min Sketch and its applications. Journal of Algorithms 55, 1 (2005), 58--75.

Digital Library

[7]

Richard Cziva, Christopher Lorier, and Dimitrios P Pezaros. 2017. Ruru: Highspeed, Flow-level Latency Measurement and Visualization of Live Internet Traffic. In ACM SIGCOMM Posters and Demos. 46--47.

Digital Library

[8]

Amogh Dhamdhere, David D Clark, Alexander Gamero-Garrido, Matthew Luckie, Ricky KP Mok, Gautam Akiwate, Kabir Gogia, Vaibhav Bajpai, Alex C Snoeren, and Kc Claffy. 2018. Inferring persistent interdomain congestion. In ACM SIGCOMM. 1--15.

[9]

Hao Ding and Michael Rabinovich. 2015. TCP stretch acknowledgements and timestamps: findings and implications for passive RTT measurement. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 45, 3 (2015), 20--27.

Digital Library

[10]

Constantine Dovrolis, Krishna Gummadi, Aleksandar Kuzmanovic, and Sascha D Meinrath. 2010. Measurement Lab: Overview and an invitation to the research community. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 40, 3 (2010), 53--56.

Digital Library

[11]

Mojgan Ghasemi, Theophilus Benson, and Jennifer Rexford. 2017. Dapper: Data plane performance diagnosis of TCP. In ACM SIGCOMM Symposium on SDN Research (SOSR). ACM, 61--74.

Digital Library

[12]

Chuanxiong Guo, Lihua Yuan, Dong Xiang, Yingnong Dang, Ray Huang, Dave Maltz, Zhaoyi Liu, Vin Wang, Bin Pang, Hua Chen, et al. 2015. Pingmesh: A large-scale system for data center network latency measurement and analysis. In ACM SIGCOMM, Vol. 45. ACM, 139--152.

Digital Library

[13]

Ritu Maheshwari, C Rama Krishna, and M Sridhar Brahma. 2014. Defending network system against IP spoofing based distributed DoS attacks using DPHCF-RTT packet filtering technique. In International Conference on Issues and Challenges in Intelligent Computing Techniques (ICICT). IEEE, 206--209.

[14]

Matt Mathis, John Heffner, and Rajiv Raghunarayan. 2007. RFC4898: TCP extended statistics MIB. IETF (2007).

[15]

Matt Mathis, John Heffner, and Raghu Reddy. 2003. Web100: Extended TCP instrumentation for research, education and diagnosis. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 33, 3 (2003), 69--79.

Digital Library

[16]

Ayman Mukaddam and Imad H Elhajj. 2012. Round trip time to improve hop count filtering. In Symposium on Broadband Networks and Fast Internet (RELABIRA). IEEE, 66--72.

[17]

Vern Paxson. 1997. Measurements and analysis of end-to-end Internet dynamics. PhD Thesis, UC Berkeley (1997).

Digital Library

[18]

Vibhaalakshmi Sivaraman, Srinivas Narayana, Ori Rottenstreich, S. Muthukrishnan, and Jennifer Rexford. 2017. Heavy-Hitter Detection Entirely in the Data Plane. In ACM SIGCOMM Symposium on SDN Research. 164--176.

[19]

Yixin Sun, Anne Edmundson, Laurent Vanbever, Oscar Li, Jennifer Rexford, Mung Chiang, and Prateek Mittal. 2015. RAPTOR: Routing Attacks on Privacy in Tor. In USENIX Security Symposium. 271--286.

Digital Library

[20]

Cheng Tan, Ze Jin, Chuanxiong Guo, Tianrong Zhang, Haitao Wu, Karl Deng, Dongming Bi, and Dong Xiang. 2019. NetBouncer: Active Device and Link Failure Localization in Data Center Networks. In NSDI. 599--614.

[21]

The P4 Language Consortium. 2018. P416 Language Specification. https://p4.org/p4-spec/docs/P4-16-v1.1.0-spec.html. (Nov. 2018).

[22]

Brian Tierney, Joe Metzger, Jeff Boote, Eric Boyd, Aaron Brown, Rich Carlson, Matt Zekauskas, Jason Zurawski, Martin Swany, and Maxim Grigoriev. 2009. perf-Sonar: Instantiating a global network measurement framework. SOSP Workshop on Real Overlays and Distributed Systems (2009).

[23]

Brian Trammell and Mirja Kuehlewind. 2019. The QUIC Latency Spin Bit. IETF Internet Draft (2019). https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-quic-spin-exp-01

[24]

Belma Turkovic, Jorik Oostenbrink, and Fernando Kuipers. 2019. Detecting Heavy Hitters in the Data-plane. arXiv preprint arXiv.1902.06993 (2019).

[25]

Bryan Veal, Kang Li, and David Lowenthal. 2005. New methods for passive estimation of TCP round-trip times. In International Workshop on Passive and Active Network Measurement. Springer, 121--134.

Digital Library

[26]

Verizon. 2020. IP Latency Statistics. (2020). https://enterprise.verizon.com/terms/latency/ Accessed: 2020-04-29.

[27]

Verizon. 2020. Service Level Agreements. (2020). http://www.verizonenterprise.com/solutions/public_sector/state_local/contracts/calnet3/sla/ Accessed: 2020-04-29.

[28]

Minlan Yu, Albert G Greenberg, David A Maltz, Jennifer Rexford, Lihua Yuan, Srikanth Kandula, and Changhoon Kim. 2011. Profiling Network Performance for Multi-tier Data Center Applications. In NSDI, Vol. 11. 5--5.

Cited By

Birge-Lee HYoo SHerber BRexford JApostolaki MVanbever LZhang I(2024)TANGOProceedings of the 21st USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation10.5555/3691825.3691923(1791-1811)Online publication date: 16-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3691825.3691923
Kfoury ECrichigno JBou-Harb E(2024)P4BS: Leveraging Passive Measurements From P4 Switches to Dynamically Modify a Router’s Buffer SizeIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2023.330633521:1(1082-1099)Online publication date: Feb-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNSM.2023.3306335
Chen XLiu HZhang WHuang QZhang DZhou HLiu XWu C(2024)Toward Full-Coverage and Low-Overhead Profiling of Network-Stack LatencyIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2024.342132732:5(4441-4455)Online publication date: Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNET.2024.3421327
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Measuring TCP Round-Trip Time in the Data Plane
1. Networks
  1. Network algorithms
    1. Data path algorithms
  2. Network performance evaluation
    1. Network measurement

Recommendations

Continuous in-network round-trip time monitoring
SIGCOMM '22: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2022 Conference

Round-trip time (RTT) is a central metric that influences end-user QoE and can expose traffic-interception attacks. Many popular RTT monitoring techniques either send active probes (that do not capture application-level RTTs) or passively monitor only ...
Improving round-trip time estimates in reliable transport protocols

As a reliable, end-to-end transport protocol, the ARPA Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) uses positive acknowledgements and retransmission to guarantee delivery. TCP implementations are expected to measure and adapt to changing network propagation ...
IPv4 Routing over IPv6 Routing Data Plane Using SRv6
SIET '23: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Sustainable Information Engineering and Technology

Segment Routing is a topic of interest in the field of networking and telecommunications, it is a source-based routing in a modern form rather than traditional routing. It comes with an innovative approach to integrating IPv4 routing and tunneling ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

SPIN '20: Proceedings of the Workshop on Secure Programmable Network Infrastructure

August 2020

53 pages

ISBN:9781450380416

DOI:10.1145/3405669

Copyright © 2020 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

SIGCOMM: ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 10 August 2020

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article
Research
Refereed limited

Funding Sources

NSF

Conference

SIGCOMM '20

Sponsor:

SIGCOMM

SIGCOMM '20: Annual conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication on the applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communication

August 10 - 14, 2020

Virtual Event, USA

Upcoming Conference

ICSE 2025

2025 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering

April 26 - May 3, 2025

Ottawa , ON , Canada

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

41
Total Citations
View Citations
1,638
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)416
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)40

Reflects downloads up to 17 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Birge-Lee HYoo SHerber BRexford JApostolaki MVanbever LZhang I(2024)TANGOProceedings of the 21st USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation10.5555/3691825.3691923(1791-1811)Online publication date: 16-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3691825.3691923
Kfoury ECrichigno JBou-Harb E(2024)P4BS: Leveraging Passive Measurements From P4 Switches to Dynamically Modify a Router’s Buffer SizeIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2023.330633521:1(1082-1099)Online publication date: Feb-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNSM.2023.3306335
Chen XLiu HZhang WHuang QZhang DZhou HLiu XWu C(2024)Toward Full-Coverage and Low-Overhead Profiling of Network-Stack LatencyIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2024.342132732:5(4441-4455)Online publication date: Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNET.2024.3421327
Chen XLiu HXiao QHuang QZhang DZhou HZhou BWu CLiu XYang Q(2024)Hermes: Low-Overhead Inter-Switch Coordination in Network-Wide Data Plane Program DeploymentIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2024.336132432:4(2842-2857)Online publication date: Aug-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNET.2024.3361324
Kim JIm YLee K(2024)Enabling Delay-Guaranteed Congestion Control With One-Bit Feedback in Cellular NetworksIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2023.326872132:1(3-16)Online publication date: Feb-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNET.2023.3268721
Wei JBin ZWenyong WQixun Z(2024)RTT Algorithm Optimization with Out-of-Order Retransmission Detection2024 21st International Computer Conference on Wavelet Active Media Technology and Information Processing (ICCWAMTIP)10.1109/ICCWAMTIP64812.2024.10873674(01-07)Online publication date: 14-Dec-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCWAMTIP64812.2024.10873674
Gomez JKfoury ECrichigno JSrivastava G(2024)Reducing the Impact of RTT Unfairness using P4-Programmable Data PlanesICC 2024 - IEEE International Conference on Communications10.1109/ICC51166.2024.10622372(427-432)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICC51166.2024.10622372
A HPathak DValluri MChinta SBedarakota AShah RTammana P(2024)Securing In-Network Fast Control Loop Systems from Adversarial Attacks2024 16th International Conference on COMmunication Systems & NETworkS (COMSNETS)10.1109/COMSNETS59351.2024.10427291(953-961)Online publication date: 3-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/COMSNETS59351.2024.10427291
Gomez JKfoury ECrichigno JSrivastava G(2024)Improving TCP Fairness in Non-Programmable Networks Using P4-Programmable Data Planes2024 IEEE International Black Sea Conference on Communications and Networking (BlackSeaCom)10.1109/BlackSeaCom61746.2024.10646283(102-107)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/BlackSeaCom61746.2024.10646283
Alghushairy OAlsini RAlhassan ZAlshdadi ABanjar AYafoz AMa X(2024)An Efficient Support Vector Machine Algorithm Based Network Outlier Detection SystemIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.336440012(24428-24441)Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3364400
Show More Cited By

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten