Effective Route Scheme of Multicast Probing to Locate High-loss Links in OpenFlow Networks

TL;DR

This paper presents a measurement framework for OpenFlow networks that efficiently locates high-loss links using multicast probing and flow-stat collection, balancing accuracy and overhead.

Contribution

It introduces a route scheme based on backbone-and-branch trees for effective high-loss link detection with minimal network load.

Findings

Simulation confirms the effectiveness of the proposed method.

The route scheme balances measurement accuracy and overhead.

The framework operates with standard OpenFlow functions.

Abstract

With the prevalence of cloud computing and contents delivery networking, OpenFlow-based centrally-managed networks with flexible and dynamic traffic engineering are demanded. To maintain a high quality of service of the network, detecting and locating high-loss links is essential. Therefore, in this paper, a measurement framework is proposed to promptly locate all high-loss links with a minimized load on both data-plane and control-plane incurred by the measurement, which assumes only standard OpenFlow functions. It combines an active measurement by probing multicast packets along a designed route and a passive measurement by collecting flow-stats of the probing flow at selected switch ports in an appropriate sequential order to access switches. In particular, by designing the measurement route based on the backbone-and-branch tree (BBT) route scheme, the measurement accuracy and the measurement overhead (i.e., the number of accesses to switches until locating all high-loss links) can be balanced. The numerical simulation demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposal.