Metherxis: Virtualized Network Functions for Micro-second Grade Latency Measurements

Network latency is critical to the success of many high-speed, low-latency applications. In this context, RFC 2544 discusses and defines a set of tests that may be used to describe the performance characteristics of a network device, but most of the available measurement tools cannot perform all the tests as described in this standard or represent high capital expenses (CAPEX). As a novel approach, this paper proposes Metherxis, a system that can be implemented on general purpose hardware and enables virtualized network functions (VNFs) based on Linux containers (LXC) to measure network device latency with micro-second grade accuracy. Results show that Metherxis can be implemented as a VNF and achieves highly accurate latency measurements.