FlowME: Lattice-based Traffic Measurement

TL;DR

FlowME introduces a lattice theory-based method for traffic measurement that minimizes hardware counters, improving scalability and resource efficiency in high-speed network environments.

Contribution

It presents a novel lattice-based approach that optimizes counter assignment for traffic measurement, enhancing scalability and performance.

Findings

Significant reduction in hardware resource usage.

Improved measurement accuracy and efficiency.

Validated through implementation on an OpenFlow switch.

Abstract

Flow-based traffic measurement is a very challenging problem: Managing counters for each individual traffic flow in hardware resources knowingly struggle to scale with high-speed links. In this paper we propose a novel lattice theory-based approach that improves flow-based measurement performances and scales by keeping the number of the maintained hardware counters to a minimum (result mathematically established in the paper). The crucial contribution of the lattice is to map the computational semantics of the packet processing to user requests for traffic measurement thus allowing for a better-informed and focused counter assignment. An implementation over an Openflow switch, FlowME, was developed and evaluated upon its memory usage, performance overhead, and processing effort to generate the minimal solution. Experimental results indicate a significant decrease in resource consumption.