4. P4STA: High Precision Network Function Benchmarking

Network function benchmarking is crucial for system understanding and optimization in computer networks, including the approaches presented in the prior Chapter 3 of this work. Specifically, an accurate capturing of the Quality of Service (QoS) identifiers latency, packet loss, throughput, and jitter is fundamental. These metrics indicate if the tested network function fulfills the postulated service quality. Further, they can be used to understand and optimize network functions. Besides latency, packet loss is a very important metric: Even slight packet loss, especially at the end of data flows, can have a strong negative influence on the flow completion time [8]. In addition, Internet access networks must guarantee zero undetected packet loss for regulatory reasons (compare Sect. 2.​2). Therefore, network function benchmarking is very important to achieve an improved network quality.