FlowWatcher: Adaptive Flow Counting for Source Routing Over Protocol Independent SDN Networks

With the rapid development and increasing scale of Data Center Network (DCN), traditional routing mechanisms cannot adapt to the growing network requirements. Source Routing (SR) is a feasible simple routing method and has been explored in DCN recently to build an efficient stateless forwarding plane. Protocol-Oblivious Forwarding (POF) is a breakthrough technology that supports arbitrary protocols and enables the forwarding elements to evolve independently from specific network protocols. In this paper, we propose POF-based source routing mechanism that eliminates existing application defects in source routing and it has been proved to work well in DCN. We develop FlowWatcher, which not only monitors elephant flows with end-host-based detection method, but also measures other abnormally changing flows dynamically, using weighted moving average (WMA) to predict future values and identify anomalies. To make an overall balance on each switch, we propose two types of rule placement algorithms separately for unicast and multicast. Finally, we take some experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of FlowWatcher and resource saving of the rule placement algorithm.