Software defined traffic measurement with OpenSketch

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.