NetMeter

General Project Information

In order to provide QoS support for IP networks, a software application must integrate all (or most of) the measurement and processing tools related with the experiments into a single environment. This application provides an integrated graphical interface for a set of tools that allows the measurement of QoS parameters over IPv4 and IPv6 networks. Network Performance Meter (NetMeter) is an Tcl/Tk application which tries to solve these tasks in a flexible and modular way.

NetMeter was developed at UPC by the CBA (Broadband Communications Research Group) and is licensed under GPL. So you are allowed to modify the source code at your will.

Features:

• IPv4 unicast and IPv6 unicast experiments
• TCP and UDP measurements
• Graphic results of QoS parameters in PNG format.
• Customizable graphic generation
• User-defined parameters
• Flexible selection of parameters represented in the graphic
• Support for some ASCII HP-Broadband Series test files
• Support for MGen and MGen6 log files

Plugin basic metrics used

• Traffic Generator: This plugin can generate UDP traffic in a network and can pick up the measurements to calculate the OWD (One Way Delay) between two synchronized points

• Throughput Generator: This plugin is focussed on overloading the network with TCP or UDP packets in order to calculate the network throughput.

• Statistics Generator: This is used for extracting statistical properties of the tests, compute all the basic QoS metrics and show the results in XML, HTML or other formats.

• Graphic Generator: This plugin is able to open and plot all the basic graphic representation of the most common statistics required on network measurements

Analysis and graphic features

• One-way Delay distribution
• IPDV distribution
• Instantaneous One-way Delay
• Instantaneous Ipdv
• Average One-way Delay
• Max/Min One-way delay
• Variance
• Standard variation
• Delay variations

On going work

• Suport for OWAMP drafts
• Integrated GPS synchronization
• And, as always, bug fixes and testing

Future work

• Full Multicast IPv4 and IPv6 support
• Database storage for tests
• Enhanced graphical plotting capabilities

Final remarks

There is another project that is also called NetMeter. Is important to notice that are separate and independent projects with diferent goals. Being this one for *NIX Operating Systems and the other one for Windows.