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uTNT: Unikernels for Efficient and Flexible Internet Probing

Maxime Letemple, Gaulthier Gain, Sami Ben Mariem, Laurent Mathy, Benoit Donnet

TL;DR

The paper addresses the rigidity of traditional Internet measurement platforms by proposing uTNT, a unikernel-based port of TNT built with Unikraft to enable on-demand, lightweight Internet probing. It provides a complete toolchain for porting network measurement software to unikernels and demonstrates that uTNT uses far less memory and deploys much faster than VMs or containers, while maintaining or improving runtime efficiency. Through a detailed performance evaluation and a cloud deployment use-case, the work shows substantial gains in deployment speed, memory footprint, and scalability, validating the practicality of unikernels for measurement tasks. The findings suggest a path toward flexible, responsive Internet measurement infrastructures, with publicly available code to facilitate broader adoption across platforms and applications.

Abstract

The last twenty years have seen the development and popularity of network measurement infrastructures. Internet measurement platforms have become common and have demonstrated their relevance in Internet understanding and security observation. However, despite their popularity, those platforms lack of flexibility and reactivity, as they are usually used for longitudinal measurements. As a consequence, they may miss detecting events that are security or Internet-related. During the same period, operating systems have evolved to virtual machines (VMs) as self-contained units for running applications, with the recent rise of unikernels, ultra-lightweight VMs tailored for specific applications, eliminating the need for a host OS. In this paper, we advocate that measurement infrastructures could take advantage of unikernels to become more flexible and efficient. We propose uTNT, a proof-of-concept unikernel-based implementation of TNT, a traceroute extension able to reveal MPLS tunnels. This paper documents the full toolchain for porting TNT into a unikernel and evaluates uTNT performance with respect to more traditional approaches. The paper also discusses a use case in which uTNT could find a suitable usage. uTNT source code is publicly available on Gitlab.

uTNT: Unikernels for Efficient and Flexible Internet Probing

TL;DR

The paper addresses the rigidity of traditional Internet measurement platforms by proposing uTNT, a unikernel-based port of TNT built with Unikraft to enable on-demand, lightweight Internet probing. It provides a complete toolchain for porting network measurement software to unikernels and demonstrates that uTNT uses far less memory and deploys much faster than VMs or containers, while maintaining or improving runtime efficiency. Through a detailed performance evaluation and a cloud deployment use-case, the work shows substantial gains in deployment speed, memory footprint, and scalability, validating the practicality of unikernels for measurement tasks. The findings suggest a path toward flexible, responsive Internet measurement infrastructures, with publicly available code to facilitate broader adoption across platforms and applications.

Abstract

The last twenty years have seen the development and popularity of network measurement infrastructures. Internet measurement platforms have become common and have demonstrated their relevance in Internet understanding and security observation. However, despite their popularity, those platforms lack of flexibility and reactivity, as they are usually used for longitudinal measurements. As a consequence, they may miss detecting events that are security or Internet-related. During the same period, operating systems have evolved to virtual machines (VMs) as self-contained units for running applications, with the recent rise of unikernels, ultra-lightweight VMs tailored for specific applications, eliminating the need for a host OS. In this paper, we advocate that measurement infrastructures could take advantage of unikernels to become more flexible and efficient. We propose uTNT, a proof-of-concept unikernel-based implementation of TNT, a traceroute extension able to reveal MPLS tunnels. This paper documents the full toolchain for porting TNT into a unikernel and evaluates uTNT performance with respect to more traditional approaches. The paper also discusses a use case in which uTNT could find a suitable usage. uTNT source code is publicly available on Gitlab.
Paper Structure (18 sections, 11 figures, 1 table)

This paper contains 18 sections, 11 figures, 1 table.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Background
  3. Unikernels
  4. Unikraft
  5. Memory Deduplication in Virtualized Environments
  6. $\upsilon$TNT
  7. Overview
  8. Implementation
  9. Performance Evaluation
  10. Methodology
  11. Results
  12. Flexible Deployment
  13. Scenario
  14. Results
  15. Discussion
  16. ...and 3 more sections

Figures (11)

  • Figure 1: Comparison of a virtual machine (VM), a container, and a unikernel.
  • Figure 2: From a traditional full stack application to an optimized Unikraft-based unikernel. The application to be ported is shipped with the essential libraries and OS components into a unikernel.
  • Figure 3: High-level overview of the different steps to port an application into a unikernel. The Unikraft developers tool is used to perform micro-libraries matching and to generate the required configuration files. After this step, the application's codebase has been patched to be compliant with Unikraft.
  • Figure 4: Size of a Docker image, a Vagrant image, and $\upsilon$TNT. Using unikernel considerably reduced disk usage.
  • Figure 5: Memory consumption of $\upsilon$TNT, compared to scamper and Vagrant. In addition, two additional configurations denoted "(+KSM)" are evaluated using a memory deduplication scanner to merge identical pages.
  • ...and 6 more figures