Software defined traffic measurement with OpenSketch
Minlan Yu, Lavanya Jose, Rui Miao · 2013
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 realworld 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. 1