FlowCover: Low-cost Flow Monitoring Scheme in Software Defined Networks

TL;DR

FlowCover is a novel SDN monitoring scheme that significantly reduces communication costs by using a global view and set cover heuristics, maintaining high accuracy in network management tasks.

Contribution

It introduces a set cover-based approach for low-cost network monitoring in SDN, optimizing polling schemes with heuristics for practical flow changes.

Findings

Reduces communication cost by approximately 50%.

Maintains high accuracy in network monitoring.

Efficient heuristics handle flow dynamics effectively.

Abstract

Network monitoring and measurement are crucial in network management to facilitate quality of service routing and performance evaluation. Software Defined Networking (SDN) makes network management easier by separating the control plane and data plane. Network monitoring in SDN is lightweight as operators only need to install a monitoring module into the controller. Active monitoring techniques usually introduce too many overheads into the network. The state-of-the-art approaches utilize sampling method, aggregation flow statistics and passive measurement techniques to reduce overheads. However, little work in literature has focus on reducing the communication cost of network monitoring. Moreover, most of the existing approaches select the polling switch nodes by sub-optimal local heuristics. Inspired by the visibility and central control of SDN, we propose FlowCover, a low-cost high-accuracy monitoring scheme to support various network management tasks. We leverage the global view of the network topology and active flows to minimize the communication cost by formulating the problem as a weighted set cover, which is proved to be NP-hard. Heuristics are presented to obtain the polling scheme efficiently and handle flow changes practically. We build a simulator to evaluate the performance of FlowCover. Extensive experiment results show that FlowCover reduces roughly 50% communication cost without loss of accuracy in most cases.