The Power of Slicing in Internet Flow Measurement

Flow measurement evolved into the primary method for measuring the composition of Internet traffic. Large ISPs and small networks use it to track dominant applications, dominant users, and traffic matrices. Cisco’s NetFlow is a widely deployed flow measurement solution that uses a configurable static sampling rate to control processor and memory usage on the router and the amount of reporting traffic generated. Proposed enhancements to the basic Sampled NetFlow solve some of its problems. Smart Sampling reduces the overhead of reporting and storing the flow records generated by NetFlow by sampling them with probability proportional to their byte counts. Adaptive NetFlow limits memory and CPU consumption at the router by dynamically adapting the sampling rate used by NetFlow. In this paper we propose “Flow Slices”, a flow measurement solution that can be deployed through a software update at routers and traffic analysis workstations. Flow Slices, inspired from Smart Sampl...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: IMC
• Authors: Ramana Rao Kompella, Cristian Estan
• Keywords: Adaptive NetFlow, IMC 2005, Sampling Rate, flow Measurement Solutions