liteFlow: Lightweight and distributed flow monitoring platform for SDN

Traditional network monitoring involving packet capturing or flow sampling has many challenges such as scalability, accuracy and availability of processing resource when networks become large-scale, high-speed and heterogeneous. SDN is a promising approach to address these challenges, but each SDN switch has it's own capacity limitation, such as it's cache memory called TCAM, and thus it needs coordination of resources with other network nodes to monitor the network in a scalable manner. liteFlow introduces an intelligent framework for authority switch selection, which is in charge of monitoring all flows between an end-hosts pair, while the other path switches simply forward packets without any monitoring process. The proposed system distributes the load of monitoring flows among SDN switches, and makes the scalability and accuracy of network monitoring manageable. This paper also implements a few metrics for flow-based network monitoring as example applications of liteFlow. The proof of concept implementation has been done using SDN testbed partially involving campus network of IIT Hyderabad.