SketchVisor: Robust Network Measurement for Software Packet Processing

Qun Huang, Xin Jin, Patrick P. C. Lee, Runhui Li, Lu Tang, Yi-Chao Chen, Gong Zhang

Abstract: Network measurement remains a missing piece in today's software packet processing platforms. Sketches provide a promising building block for filling this void by monitoring every packet with fixed-size memory and bounded errors. However, our analysis shows that existing sketch-based measurement solutions suffer from severe performance drops under high traffic load. Although sketches are efficiently designed, applying them in network measurement inevitably incurs heavy computational overhead.We present SketchVisor, a robust network measurement framework for software packet processing. It augments sketch-based measurement in the data plane with a fast path, which is activated under high traffic load to provide high-performance local measurement with slight accuracy degradations. It further recovers accurate network-wide measurement results via compressive sensing. We have built a SketchVisor prototype on top of Open vSwitch. Extensive testbed experiments show that SketchVisor achieves high throughput and high accuracy for a wide range of network measurement tasks and microbenchmarks.