Maptperf: An RFC 8219 compliant tester for benchmarking MAP-T border relay routers

The Benchmarking Working Group of IETF has published a comprehensive methodology in its RFC 8219 for benchmarking IPv6 transition technologies. The Mapping of Address and Port using Translation (MAP-T) is one of the most prominent of these technologies, which is also considered a stateless IPv4-as-a-Service (IPv4aaS) technology that belongs to the double translation category in RFC 8219. This paper presents the design and implementation of Maptperf, the World's first MAP-T benchmarking tool that complies with the guidelines of RFC 8219 to test the performance of the Border Relay (BR) router device of the technology since it is considered the focal point of its scalability. As part of the work accomplished in this paper, several design considerations, operational requirements, and configuration settings are discussed. Then, a detailed description of the implementation is disclosed, along with various important design decisions that are considered regarding implementation. Finally, the research findings related to Maptperf for two tests, the performance estimation and the functional tests, are presented. The performance estimation test proves how fast and robust Maptperf is via an initial assessment of its performance, while the functional tests include four types of measurements: Throughput, Frame Loss Rate (FLR), Latency, and Packet Delay Variation (PDV) for MAP-T implementations. For the latter case, the authors chose a popular MAP-T BR implementation, Jool, whose function is also validated via a testbed installed for this purpose.