FlexMonitor: A Flexible Monitoring Framework in SDN

Abstract

Efficient network monitoring is an important basis work for network management. Generally, many management applications require accurate and timely statistics about network states at different aggregation levels at low cost, such as malicious traffic detection, traffic engineering, etc. Moreover, the network environment to be monitored is constantly changing and expanding, including not only the data center for cloud computing but also the Internet of Things (IoT) for smart urban sensing, which requires the intensive study of more fine-grained network monitoring. As is well known, the development of efficient network monitoring approaches greatly relies on a flexible monitoring framework. Software defined network (SDN) can provide dramatic advantages for network management by separating the control plane and data plane. Therefore, it is a good choice to design a flexible monitoring framework based on the advantages of SDN. However, most research works only take advantage of the centralized control feature in SDN, which leads to limited improvement in the flexibility of the monitoring framework. This paper proposes a flexible monitoring framework named FlexMonitor, which can realize greater flexibility based on not only the centralized control feature, but also the high programmability in the controller and the limited programmability in the openflow switches in SDN. There are two key parts in FlexMonitor, namely the monitoring strategy deployment part and the monitoring data collection part, which can enrich the deployment methods of monitoring strategies and increase the kinds of monitoring data sources, respectively. Based on the NetMagic platform, this monitoring framework was implemented and evaluated through realizing a distributed denial of service (DDoS) detection approach. The experimental results show that the proposed DDoS detection approach has a better detection performance compared with other related approaches as well as indirectly show that FlexMonitor can flexibly support a variety of efficient monitoring approaches.

SD-RAN Interactive Management Using In-band Network Telemetry in IEEE 802.11 Networks

“…Many studies pointed out possible bottlenecks at the control channel and attempted to alleviate them by distributing the control logic [6]. On the other hand, monitoring techniques such as device statistics polling [57] [55] and active probing [41] also attempted to decrease the communication overhead using an adaptive polling rate [61] or probing rate [45]. However, given the coarse granularity of the monitored information, these techniques are not always able to identify network performance issues [37].…”

In-Band Network Monitoring Technique to Support SDN-Based Wireless Networks

“…Currently, network monitoring techniques consist in either network device statistics polling [12], [13] or active probing [14]. Though they decrease the communication overhead using adaptive polling rate [12], [15] or probing rate [16], still introducing special traffic for network monitoring purposes impacts the network behavior. In addition, they are not sufficient in localizing the network performance problems [17].…”