SFANT: A SRv6-Based Flexible and Active Network Telemetry Scheme in Programming Data Plane

With the innovation of industrial business, there is an urgent need to propose real-time and flexible measurement solutions that can cope with some use cases. In-band network telemetry enables user packets to directly carry network status information, providing a new network measurement way. However, embedding telemetry information reduces the payload ratio of user packets. Besides, the monitoring range is limited by the transmission path of packets. In this article, an active network telemetry scheme based on P4 is proposed, which introduces the SRv6 mechanism based on custom probes. It collects network status information from the data plane forwarding device, which ensures the accuracy of telemetry information and the granularity of packet-level collection. In addition, the probe collects the network information according to the specified path and flexibly arranges the monitoring target, range, and information category based on the telemetry requirements. The experimental results demonstrate that the scheme has high statistical accuracy and can effectively cover the telemetry range with the minimum path cost while utilizing link bandwidth resources more sparingly, which provides a more flexible way for network telemetry.