Software defined traffic measurement with OpenSketch

TLDR

Software‑defined networking requires both measurement and control, yet most research focuses on control APIs while measurement remains under‑explored, creating a challenge to design an API that balances broad applicability with high‑speed, low‑cost operation. This work introduces OpenSketch, a software‑defined traffic measurement architecture that decouples the measurement data plane from the control plane. OpenSketch’s data plane implements a three‑stage pipeline—hashing, filtering, and counting—using commodity switch components, while its control plane offers a library that automatically configures the pipeline and allocates resources for diverse measurement tasks. Experiments on real packet traces, a NetFPGA prototype, and five measurement tasks demonstrate that OpenSketch is general, efficient, and easily programmable.

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.