Measuring application error rates for network processors

Faults in computer systems can occur due to a variety of reasons. In many systems, an error has a binary effect, i.e. the output is either correct or it is incorrect. However, networking applications exhibit different properties. For example, although a portion of the code behaves incorrectly due to a fault, the application can still work correctly. Integrity of a network system is often unchanged during faults. Therefore, measuring the effects of faults on the network processor applications require new measurement metrics to be developed. In this paper, we highlight essential application properties and data structures that can be used to measure the error behavior of network processors. Using these metrics, we study the error behavior of seven representative networking applications under different cache access fault probabilities.