MeasuRouting: A Framework for Routing Assisted Traffic Monitoring

Abstract

Monitoring transit traffic at one or more points in a network is of interest to network operators for reasons of traffic accounting, debugging or troubleshooting, forensics, and traffic engineering. Previous research in the area has focused on deriving a placement of monitors across the network towards the end of maximizing the monitoring utility of the network operator for a given traffic routing. However, both traffic characteristics and measurement objectives can dynamically change over time, rendering a previously optimal placement of monitors suboptimal. It is not feasible to dynamically redeploy/reconfigure measurement infrastructure to cater to such evolving measurement requirements. We address this problem by strategically routing traffic sub-populations over fixed monitors. We refer to this approach as MeasuRouting.The main challenge for MeasuRouting is to work within the constraints of existing intra-domain traffic engineering operations that are geared for efficiently utilizing bandwidth resources, or meeting Quality of Service (QoS) constraints, or both. A fundamental feature of intra-domain routing, that makes MeasuRouting feasible, is that intra-domain routing is often specified for aggregate flows. MeasuRouting, can therefore, differentially route components of an aggregate flow while ensuring that the aggregate placement is compliant to original traffic engineering objectives. In this paper we present a theoretical framework for MeasuRouting. Furthermore, as proofs-of-concept, we present synthetic and practical monitoring applications to showcase the utility enhancement achieved with MeasuRouting.

Distributed measurement-aware routing: Striking a balance between measurement and traffic engineering

“…In each set of topology, we first calculate multiple paths for every OD (origin-destination) pair nodes to simulate the (ECMP)-like algorithm in practical scenarios, and run DisMR on those multiple paths. Our simulations have three goals: (1) determine good parameters for the algorithm to quickly reach equilibrium state without significant oscillations; (2) show that the measurement gain of the network at equilibrium state is close to the offline maximum achievable gain calculated by static centralized MeasuRouting; (3) show that it indeed improves measurement gain in dynamic traffic scenario compared to static centralized MeasuRouting.…”

“…In contrast to MeasuRouting [2],we assume independent uniform sampling across all participated routers, where each router independently selects a packet with a sampling probability (typically between 0.001 and 0.01) and aggregates the selected packets into flow records (e.g., via Netflow [1]). Let S a be the given fixed sampling rate at every arc a ∈ A where A stands for the set of all arcs in the network.…”

“…However, both traffic characteristics and measurement objectives can dynamically change over time, rendering a carefully designed placement of monitors sub-optimal. To address these limitations, a measurementaware routing framework, MeasuRouting, was recently proposed to assist traffic measurement [2]. It introduces routing as another degree of freedom and intelligently routes traffic sub-populations over pre-deployed monitors to maximize the traffic measurement gain.…”

A First Step Toward Network Security Virtualization: From Concept To Prototype

“…Sekar et al suggested approaches for NIDS or NIPS deployment [30] through selectively monitoring packets at different nodes and load balancing [12] through traffic replication and aggregation. Raza et al introduced an approach to route packets to network monitoring points [29]. Even though our work is similar in that our work finds new routing paths for security devices, our work provides in-depth analysis of routing algorithms, and provides more diverse routing and response strategies considering security devices.…”

Artificial intelligence enabled software‐defined networking: a comprehensive overview

“…Software-defined networking (SDN) adopts the concept of programmable networks by using a logically centralised management, which represents a simplified solution for complex tasks such as traffic engineering [1], network optimisation [2] and orchestration [3]. Furthermore, dealing with modern network applications requires more scalable architecture which should be able to provide reliable and sufficient services based on a specific traffic type [4].…”