Abstract

The advent of Software-Defined Networking with OpenFlow first, and subsequently the emergence of programmable data planes, has boosted lot of research around many networking aspects: monitoring, security, traffic engineering. In the context of network monitoring, most of the proposed solutions show the benefits of data plane programmability by simplifying the complexity of the network with a one big-switch abstraction. Only few papers look at network-wide solutions, but consider the network as non heterogeneous: only composed by programmable devices. In this paper, we argue that the primary challenge for a successful adoption of those solutions is the deployment problem: how to compose and monitor a network consisting of both legacy and programmable switches? We propose an approach for incrementally deploy programmable devices in an ISP network with the goal of monitoring as many distinct network flows as possible. While assessing the benefits of our solution, we realized that proposed network-wide monitoring algorithms might not be optimized for a partial deployment scenario. We then also developed a novel strategy capable of detecting network-wide heavy flows with the same accuracy of state-of-the-art solutions but by relying on less information from the data plane.

Abstract

Internet traffic is generated by a multitude of applications, each one with diverse service requirements in terms of bandwidth, latency, reliability, etc. Today traffic engineering techniques can provide service differentiation at the IP/MPLS layer, but not at the optical layer. In this paper we propose a framework where application service requirements drive a dynamic multi-layer (IP/MPLS and optical) resource allocation and optimization. We compare by means of simulations such application-aware algorithmic framework with a multi-layer but application-unaware strategy. Results show that the application-aware approach, unlike the application-unaware one, is always able to guarantee the specified service requirements to those applications whose generated traffic is accepted by the network. In addition, the application-aware strategy does not consume more network resources than the application-unaware one, but only requires a network that is more dynamic and responsive.