RFC 2544 Latency Testing on Cisco ASR 1000 Series Aggregation Services Routers

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By Cisco Systems

Abstract:

This whitepaper examines and analyses traffic latency on the Cisco ASR 1000 Series Routers. The Cisco ASR 1000 has three forwarding engines known as Cisco ASR 1000 Series Embedded Services Processors (ESPs). This document will review the latency of two of those ESP forwarding engines, specifically the 10-Gbps Cisco ASR 1000 Series ESP (ASR1000-ESP10) and 20-Gbps Cisco ASR 1000 Series ESP (ASR1000-ESP20) forwarding engines. The goal of this whitepaper is to highlight how different forwarding rates impact the latency of the Cisco ASR 1000. This document highlights some of the choices that you must make while designing your network. This document covers the impact on overall latency relating to queuing, shaping and QoS which can impact the overall performance of your network.

The ASR1000-ESP20 was profiled in a WAN aggregation topology with services enabled to gain insight of how the system latency is affected while approaching the throughput non-drop rate (NDR).

This paper delivers results in two parts:
Phase 1: Reporting RFC 2544 latency results for IP routing with and without services enabled as detailed in the RFC 2544 Test Setup. The results reported are the latency at the calculated NDR for that packet size/test.
Phase 2: Profiling latency for different frame sizes at data points approaching the NDR in a WAN aggregation topology, in order to clearly illustrate and analyze the behaviour of the system.

Test results obtained from this testing are based on Cisco IOS XE release 2.2.2 for all tests. The routers were tested using procedures based on RFC 2544 Latency Testing.