Software Defined Traffic Measurement with OpenSketch
Authors:
Minlan Yu, University of Southern California; Lavanya Jose, Princeton University; Rui Miao, University of Southern California
Abstract:
Most network management tasks in software-defined networks (SDN) involve two stages: measurement and control. While many efforts have been focused on network control APIs for SDN, little attention goes into measurement. The key challenge of designing a new measurement API is to strike a careful balance between generality (supporting a wide variety of measurement tasks) and efficiency (enabling high link speed and low cost). We propose a software defined traffic measurement architecture OpenSketch, which separates the measurement data plane from the control plane. In the data plane, OpenSketch provides a simple three-stage pipeline (hashing, filtering, and counting), which can be implemented with commodity switch components and support many measurement tasks. In the control plane, OpenSketch provides a measurement library that automatically configures the pipeline and allocates resources for different measurement tasks. Our evaluations of real world packet traces, our prototype on NetFPGA, and the implementation of five measurement tasks on top of OpenSketch, demonstrate that OpenSketch is general, efficient and easily programmable.
USENIX is committed to Open Access to the research presented at our events. Papers and proceedings are freely available to everyone once the event begins. Any video, audio, and/or slides that are posted after the event are also free and open to everyone. Support USENIX and our commitment to Open Access.
BibTeX
@inproceedings {180293,
author = {Minlan Yu and Lavanya Jose and Rui Miao},
title = {Software {Defined} {Traffic} Measurement with {OpenSketch}},
booktitle = {10th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 13)},
year = {2013},
isbn = {978-1-931971-00-3},
address = {Lombard, IL},
pages = {29--42},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi13/technical-sessions/presentation/yu},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = apr
}
This paper presents OpenSketch; software-defined traffic measurement architecture. The authors are motivated to create an architecture that would provide for measurement what software-defined networking architectures are to networks. The philosophy of this approach is to give network-operators the tools needed to deploy a common measurement architecture able to cover a wide range of types of measurement; intended to address the problem of overly specific, narrowly focussed solutions, the authors offer OpenSketch.
At its core OpenSketch decomposes measurement tasks into a pipeline of operations intended to be reasonable to implement on switch or router. These measurement operations implement, in this example, tasks based upon concept of a the traffic 'sketch' described previously in the measurement literature. A 'sketch', as utilised in this work, is a flexible concept that may capture a single counter of some property of a flow, e.g., byte-count, through to a NetFlow-like record, through to packet-size histogram and so on. Interested readers are referred to the cited literature [35,36] for more detailed description of Sketches.
The nomenclature of the paper owes much to the SDN literature: a (measurement) data-plane implements operations such as the hashing, filtering and counting of packets. In doing so the data-plane implements the specific operations of the pipeline in a locally-optimal fashion: for example, switches and routers each having specialist measurements. The control-plane manages where and what measurements are taken, including a prioritisation mechanism to ensure some resource control is maintained. The controller aggregates results, and prioritises measurement-tasks permitting explicit control over the trading accuracy of results for and resource (memory-consumption) management. The OpenSketch architecture additionally incorporates a protocol to move measurement data with a calculable degree of trade-off between resources and accuracy to get a certain level of error rate. Results are provided showing the trade-off between resource and accuracy.
The authors describe several efforts, from a NetFPGA implementation of measurement operations, to a simulator-based study of the memory-vs-accuracy tradeoffs of OpenSketch when compared-with NetFlow and streaming algorithms for measurement. Commendably, the authors have provided the codebase that is at the core of this paper in a publicly available repository. While the authors, by their own admission, have only opened the door on flexible measurement, and only hinted at how the Software Defined future for Networks and Measurement compliment each other, I believe this paper provides a great example of the sort of provocative ideas that the rebirth of SDN would spawn.
connect with us