Measuring Network Conditions in Data Centers Using the Precision Time Protocol

Abstract

Increased network latency and packets losses can affect substantially application performance. Due to the scale of data centers, custom network monitoring tools have been developed to measure network latency and packet loss. In this paper, we use the Precision Time Protocol (PTP) to estimate one-way delay and to quantify packet loss ratios. We propose PTPmesh as a cloud network monitoring tool which uses PTPd as a building block. We present an analysis of PTPmesh latency and packet loss measurements collected in ten data centers from three cloud providers. Our findings reveal different latency, latency variance, packet loss and path symmetry characteristics across data centers. To foster further research in this area, we make our dataset available at Popescu and Moore (2018).