End-to-end flow monitoring with IPFIX

Abstract

End-to-End (E2E) flow monitoring is useful for observing performance of networks such as throughput, jitter and delay. Typically, E2E flow monitoring is carried out at end hosts with known tools such as iperf. However, the end-host approach may not be easily deployed in a large-scale network because of high cost and administrative overhead. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new E2E flow monitoring method based on IP Flow Information eXport (IPFIX) that could provide QoS metrics such as throughput, retransmission rate, delay, and jitter for TCP flows and SIP-signalled RTP flows. We have extended the IPFIX templates for carrying QoS-related fields, and developed the E2E flow monitoring function with the open source that could be embedded into routers. From experiments, it was shown that the performance of TCP and RTP flows could be easily examined with the IPFIX-based approach. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.