Session P4STA: Emulation-Driven Terabit Benchmarking for Access Networks
Key: SHK26
Author: Fridolin Siegmund, Matthias Hollick, Ralf Kundel
Date: November 2026
Kind: In proceedings
Book title: Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networks 2026
Abstract: Home and business subscribers access the Internet through wired or wireless access networks. In these networks, termination nodes aggregate thousands of sessions and provide functions such as tunnel termination and traffic shaping, making multi-session traffic tests crucial for development, deployment planning, and maintenance. We design and release Session P4STA, an open-source framework for all-in-one access network benchmarking, that combines session establishment and load injection with configurable traffic patterns. The prototype provides a web-based GUI for session establishment and session load generation with a Broadband Network Gateway (BNG) termination node. Its modular design allows extension to other termination nodes, such as the 5G core network. By combining software-based session establishment with P4-programmable hardware for high-performance data plane processing, Session P4STA supports a wide range of BNG testing scenarios. We evaluate the prototype by measuring the impact of session scaling on forwarding latency for a hardware-based BNG and a software-based implementation. The prototype is further used to generate bursty 300 Gbit/s flows and analyze their impact on the latency of neighboring flows, while the platform offers up to 12.8 Tbit/s aggregated bandwidth. Compared to existing open-source BNG benchmarking tools, Session P4STA achieves an order-of-magnitude higher throughput with improved timestamping accuracy and minimal jitter.
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