Revisiting the case for a minimalist approach for network flow monitoring

Network management applications require accurate estimates of a wide range of flow-level traffic metrics. Given the inadequacy of current packet-sampling-based solutions, several application-specific monitoring algorithms have emerged. While these provide better accuracy for the specific applications they target, they increase router complexity and require vendors to commit to hardware primitives without knowing how useful they will be to meet the needs of future applications. In this paper, we show using trace-driven evaluations that such complexity and early commitment may not be necessary. We revisit the case for a "minimalist" approach in which a small number of simple yet generic router primitives collect flow-level data from which different traffic metrics can be estimated. We demonstrate the feasibility and promise of such a minimalist approach using flow sampling and sample-and-hold as sampling primitives and configuring these in a network-wide coordinated fashion us...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: IMC
• Authors: Vyas Sekar, Michael K. Reiter, Hui Zhang
• Keywords: Flow-level Traffic Metrics, IMC 2010, Internet Technology, Minimalist Approach, Traffic Metrics