Implementing and validating IOAM in VPP

Abstract

Nowadays, networks are constantly evolving : their complexity, their size and the amount of data that traverses them increase. For these reasons, gathering telemetry data for those networks is an important challenge. IOAM, which stands for In-situ Operations, Administration and Maintenance is one of the solution to resolve this challenge.

As IOAM has already been implemented in the linux kernel, the goal of this master's thesis was to leverage IOAM mechanisms with another support. VPP was chosen to be this support. Although VPP is implemented in user space, it is optimised a lot and it is known for its great performances.

This work was conducted in two parts. Firstly, IOAM has been integrated into VPP. Secondly, the implementation has been validated through performance tests to see how efficient it could be thanks to vector packet processing technology.

At the end, VPP can now be equipped with a working and up-to-date implementation of IOAM with IPv6. In terms of performances, the tests that have been carried showed that IOAM implementation in VPP was efficient enough to be used in practice.