A hardware-accelerated infrastructure for flexible sketch-based network traffic monitoring

Abstract

Sketch-based data streaming algorithms are used in many network traffic monitoring applications to obtain accurate estimates of traffic flow. However, the flexibility is limited as hardware implementation of sketch counters may not be re-used for different measurement tasks. In this paper, we develop a generic hardware infrastructure for collecting flow statistics. The purpose is to achieve the goal of adopting various sketch-based algorithms with arbitrary flow aggregations for monitoring applications and measurement tasks in a flexible manner. Multiple-choice hashing with linear probing scheme is utilized for high-speed counter update process. Simulation results based on real traffic traces for monitoring applications are presented. The proposed hardware infrastructure is implemented on the NetFPGA-10G platform. The system is capable of processing network traffic at 53 Gbps in a worst-case scenario of 64-byte minimum-sized Ethernet frame.