Measuring Network Parameters with Hardware Support

To provide good QoS in a computer network, robust means to measure essential network parameters are required. A multitude of options are available to perform this task. This report details our hardware implementation of three such schemes on FPGAs (Field-Programmable Gate Arrays). The first scheme calculates the packet loss and one-way network delay using RTF over UDP; the second one uses the concept of TOPPs (Train of Packet Pairs) to measure the available bandwidth, and the third one is a partial implementation of TCP, which can be developed further to measure various parameters. Our analysis shows that these implementations can carry out efficient parameter measurements at reasonable hardware cost. In addition, experiments are used to compare three hashing schemes for storing TCP tuple information; real benchmarks are used.