Robust Counting Via Counter Braids: An Error-Resilient Network Measurement Architecture

—A novel counter architecture, called Counter Braids, has recently been proposed for accurate per-flow measurement on high-speed links. Inspired by sparse random graph codes, Counter Braids solves two central problems of per-flow measurement: one-to-one flow-to-counter association and large amount of unused counter space. It eliminates the one-to-one association by randomly hashing a flow label to multiple counters and minimizes counter space by incrementally compressing counts as they accumulate. The random hash values are reproduced offline from a list of flow labels, with which flow sizes are decoded using a fast message passing algorithm. The decoding of Counter Braids introduces the problem of collecting flow labels active in a measurement epoch. An exact solution to this problem is expensive. This paper complements the previous proposal with an approximate flow label collection scheme and a novel error-resilient decoder that decodes despite missing flow labels. The ap...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Yi Lu, Balaji Prabhakar
• Keywords: Communications, Counter Braids, INFOCOM 2009, Sparse Random Graph, flow Labels