Per-Packet Traffic Measurement in Storage, Computation and Bandwidth Limited Data Plane

Packet level measurement in the data plane provides a microscopic view of the network’s state. Although advances in programmable switches and routers make it possible to measure the Sequence of Packet Lengths and Arrival Times (SPLT) in the data plane, collecting this information remains challenging due to limited storage, processing resources, and bandwidth. To address this issue, we propose MES, which Measures and Encodes Simultaneously the packet length and timestamp when each packet passes through the Network Processor (NP) in the switch/router. We design the packet length compression and timestamp compression algorithms to be lightweight and implement the designed algorithms using simple operations supported by the network processor, while taking into account the computation constraints of the NP. Through extensive experiments on five packet traces, we demonstrate that our MES achieves high precision SPLT measurements (up to 99.82% cosine similarity) while reducing storage and bandwidth overhead by up to 87%. Simulations conducted on the BMV2 P4 software switch demonstrate that our designed SPLT measurement mechanism imposes little impact on network throughput and delay.

I. Introduction

Network measurement plays a crucial role in network operations and management tasks [7], [12], [42]. Packet-level measurement in the data plane provides a microscopic view of the network’s state. Monitoring the Sequence of Packet Lengths and Times (SPLT) has become increasingly important recently [15].