CodedINT: Leveraging Network Coding to Improve the Visibility of In-band Network Telemetry (INT)

With momentum gained from programmable data plane (PDP), in-band network telemetry (INT) has been widely considered as a promising technique for realtime network monitoring. In this work, we leverage network coding (NC) to design CodedINT, for improving the visibility of INT in lossy networks. Specifically, we propose to encode the telemetry data in multiple packets with NC and distribute the encoded data over a group of packets. Then, among the group of packets, if we can receive enough ones that satisfy the decoding condition of NC, the whole original telemetry data can be recovered. We first explain the design of CodedINT to elaborate on its operation principle, packet format, and system implementation. Then, we implement and experimentally evaluate CodedINT in a real network testbed. Our experiments demonstrate that in a lossy network with packet loss rate at 80%, CodedINT ensures that 89.48% of the telemetry data carried by INT packets can be recovered successfully.