Traffic Structure-Aware Network Telemetry Systems: Foundations, Designs, and Applications
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Date
2024-08-07
Authors
Misa, Chris
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
Real-time traffic monitoring is a mission-critical capability for engineers and administrators tasked with managing modern computer networks. To cope with the challenges of extremely large traffic volumes, the emergence of programmable switch hardware promises the possibility of traffic monitoring systems with high packet processing efficiency, low energy and capital costs, and the ability to produce detailed results for a wide range of tasks. However, the high efficiency of programmable switch hardware necessitates a constrained programming model with access to only a small amount of high-speed memory, a limited number of primitive operations per packet, and tens of seconds of network downtime each time the program is changed. Despite significant research effort on developing efficient traffic monitoring systems within these constraints, current approaches are critically limited in light of real-world traffic structure and task requirements.
To address these limitations and to pave the way for principled approaches in future research, we leverage the observation that real-world network traffic is not generated uniformly at random, but exhibits complex statistical structure resulting from human and machine communications. By developing characterizations of this structure, we propose a novel refocusing of state-of-the-art towards investigation of structure-aware telemetry systems to improve the efficiency and practicality of real-world traffic monitoring tasks. In particular, we develop novel contributions in characterizing traffic structure, designing algorithms for traffic monitoring capabilities on programmable switch hardware, and leveraging these capabilities for practical real-world traffic monitoring tasks.
This dissertation includes previously published co-authored material as well as previously unpublished co-authored material.
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Keywords
network traffic monitoring, programmable switch hardware, traffic structure