ACE: an Accurate and Cost-Effective Measurement System in SDN

TL;DR

ACE is a measurement system for SDN that optimally balances measurement accuracy and resource cost using a multi-objective heuristic approach, demonstrated to outperform existing methods.

Contribution

Proposes ACE, a novel SDN measurement system that formulates and heuristically solves a multi-objective optimization problem for accuracy-cost balance.

Findings

ACE outperforms existing methods in accuracy and cost efficiency.

The heuristic approach effectively solves the NP-hard optimization problem.

Prototype implementation confirms practical benefits in real-world topologies.

Abstract

Packet-level traffic measurement is essential in applications like QoS, traffic engineering, or anomaly detection. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) enables efficient and dynamic network configuration that we can deploy for fine-grained network state measurement. As the state changes dynamically, the sampling frequency must cope with that for accurate measurement. At the same time, we must consider the measurement cost, e.g., nodes' resource utilization. Existing works fall short in offering an optimal model to balance both the measurement accuracy and cost. We fill that gap by proposing ACE, an accurate and cost-effective measurement system that builds on a multi-objective optimization problem. As the optimization problem is NP-hard, we develop a heuristic. We solve the model using CPLEX; then implement a prototype of ACE in Mininet over real-world network topologies. The results confirm that ACE outperforms its counterparts in balancing both accuracy and cost.