In verifying our latest software release for LANforge, I wanted an independent way to verify and measure the jitter imposed on a wanlink. There are many ways to accomplish this, but here is a summary of my procedure.

• Synchronize clocks
• Setup a wanlink with delay and jitter
• Start captures on sender and receiver
• Start UDP traffic in one direction
• Run the captures through a script to estimate the jitter
• Compare to LANforge jitter measurement

The information from the following links was very helpful in creating a bash script to calculate jitter from wireshark captures:

• https://ask.wireshark.org/questions/12837/udp-packets-jitter-and-delay
• http://toncar.cz/Tutorials/VoIP/VoIP_Basics_Jitter.html
• http://babilonline.blogspot.de/2008/05/jitter.html

The network topology I used was two computers each with a network interface connected to the other through a switch. Each computer is running the LANforge software, so I was able to create a wanlink on one interface so that the latency and jitter impairments would affect packets leaving that interface.

To synchronize the clocks, I used ntpd on one system and ntpdate on the other.

The wanlink was set to 1.544Mbps with 10ms of delay and 100ms of jitter at a frequency of 1%. As I was capturing traffic, I varied the jitter frequency from 1% to 10% to 50% then 0%. See the LANforge User Guide for a detailed explanation of how jitter is set:

https://www.candelatech.com/lfgui_ug.php#wl_mod

I initiated the wireshark captures from the LANforge Port Manager, but could have also used tshark to do this.

The UDP traffic was a one-way 56Kbps connection from eth1 on one system to the virtual interface behind the wanlink on the other system. The connection ran for about 180 seconds while I varied the jitter frequency on the wanlink.

I stopped the captures and filtered out all other traffic such as arps or icmps so that only lanforge protocol traffic remained and then ran the captures through the getjitter.bash script which also generated this image:

This matched up to what the LANforge Dynamic Report tool displayed for the jitter measurement on the connection:

The bash script below is used as follows:

./getjitter.bash sender.pcap receiver.pcap

It uses tshark, bc, gnuplot and qiv. It could probably be cleaned up, but the jitter estimate appears to be accurate.

#!/bin/bash

tshark -r $1 -T fields -e frame.time_epoch > frametimeS
tshark -r $2 -T fields -e frame.time_epoch > frametimeR
tshark -r $1 |awk '{print $2}' > ticks
tshark -r $1 -T fields -e udp.length > rates

declare -a S=(`cat frametimeS`)
declare -a R=(`cat frametimeR`)
declare -a T=(`cat ticks`)
declare -a Rate=(`cat rates`)
jitter=0
i=0

j=`echo ${#S[@]}`
let j=$j-2

for ((k=0; k<=$j; k++)); do
 #echo "${R[$i]} ${R[i+1]}"
 D=`echo "(${R[i+1]} - ${R[$i]}) - (${S[i+1]} - ${S[$i]})" |bc |tr -d -`
 rate=`echo "((${Rate[$i]}*8) / (${S[i+1]} - ${S[$i]}))" |bc |tr -d -`
 jitter=`echo "$jitter + ($D - $jitter)/16" |bc -l`
 #printf "%12s - %12s = %12s , %12s\n" ${R[i+1]} ${R[$i]} $D $jitter
 echo "${T[$i]} $jitter $rate" >> myjitter
 i=$i+1
done

echo 'set style data points' > jitter.gp
echo 'set nogrid' >> jitter.gp

echo 'set style line 1 lt 1 lw 2' >> jitter.gp
echo 'set style line 2 lt 2 lw 2' >> jitter.gp
echo 'set style line 3 lt 3 lw 5' >> jitter.gp
echo 'set style line 4 lt 3 lw 1' >> jitter.gp
echo 'set style line 5 lt 3 lw 2' >> jitter.gp
echo 'set style line 6 lt 3 lw 1' >> jitter.gp
echo 'set style line 7 lt 17 lw 2' >> jitter.gp
echo 'set style line 8 lt 17 lw 4' >> jitter.gp

echo 'set xlabel "Time (sec)"' >> jitter.gp
echo 'set ylabel "Jitter (sec)"' >> jitter.gp

echo 'plot "myjitter" using 1:($2/1) title "jitter" with impulses ls 6' >> jitter.gp

echo 'set term png' >> jitter.gp
echo 'set output "jitter.png"' >> jitter.gp
echo 'replot' >> jitter.gp

gnuplot jitter.gp 2>&1 1>/dev/null
qiv jitter.png &

The next steps for improving this jitter measurement would be to incorporate a sequence number check to look for drops and a latency measurement to get a more detailed evaluation of the impairments setup on the wanlink.

For the latency measurement, I came up with this script used as follows:

./getlatency.bash sender.pcap receiver.pcap

It makes use of the lanforge protocol as decoded by wireshark to acquire and verify sequence numbers.

#!/bin/bash

tshark -r $1 -T fields -e lanforge.seqno > seqno1
tshark -r $2 -T fields -e lanforge.seqno > seqno2
tshark -r $1 -T fields -e frame.time_epoch > frame1
tshark -r $2 -T fields -e frame.time_epoch > frame2
tshark -r $1 |awk '{print $2}' > ticks

declare -a array1=(`cat seqno1`)
declare -a array2=(`cat seqno2`)
declare -a frame1=(`cat frame1`)
declare -a frame2=(`cat frame2`)
declare -a T=(`cat ticks`)
latency=0
i=0

for key in "${!array1[@]}";
do
 if [ $key == ${array2[$key]} ]; then
 array1[$key]=${frame1[$key]}
 array2[$key]=${frame2[$key]}
 else
 unset array1[$key]
 unset array2[$key]
 fi
 
 latency=`echo "(${array2[$key]} - ${array1[$key]})*1000" |bc -l`
 if [[ $latency == 1[1-9][1-9]* ]]; then
 echo "${T[$key]} $latency" 
 fi
 echo "${T[$key]} $latency" >> mylatency
done

echo 'set style data points' > latency.gp
echo 'set nogrid' >> latency.gp

echo 'set style line 1 lt 1 lw 2' >> latency.gp
echo 'set style line 2 lt 2 lw 2' >> latency.gp
echo 'set style line 3 lt 3 lw 5' >> latency.gp
echo 'set style line 4 lt 3 lw 1' >> latency.gp
echo 'set style line 5 lt 3 lw 2' >> latency.gp
echo 'set style line 6 lt 3 lw 1' >> latency.gp
echo 'set style line 7 lt 17 lw 2' >> latency.gp
echo 'set style line 8 lt 17 lw 4' >> latency.gp

echo 'set xlabel "Time (sec)"' >> latency.gp
echo 'set ylabel "Latency (ms)"' >> latency.gp

echo 'plot "mylatency" using 1:($2/1) title "latency" with impulses ls 6' >> latency.gp

echo 'set term png' >> latency.gp
echo 'set output "latency.png"' >> latency.gp
echo 'replot' >> latency.gp

gnuplot latency.gp 2>&1 1>/dev/null
qiv latency.png &

Which produced this image:

This shows that the capture files verify that there is about a 17ms baseline delay due to the 7ms serialization delay and 10ms additional delay setup on the wanlink. As I increased the jitter frequency, more packets experienced the 100ms jitter.