IDEAFIX: Identifying Elephant Flows in P4-Based IXP Networks

Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) are high-performance networks that allow multiple autonomous systems to exchange traffic, with benefits ranging from cost reductions to performance improvements. In addition, performance requirements and a number of players involved in such networks bring out several issues to management tasks, such as elephant flows identification. This kind of flows, with high size and substantial duration, can severely impact the performance of smaller flows. In this paper, we present IDEAFIX, a mechanism to identify elephant flows in P4-based IXP networks. Our approach consists in analyzing flows features for each ingress packet immediately in the edge switch. These features are then stored in P4 registers, indexed by hash keys, and compared to predefined thresholds for flow classification. Experimental evaluations show that IDEAFIX is significantly more efficient than the state-of-the-art approaches implemented with sFlow and traditional Software-Defined Networking (SDN) tools (e.g., OpenFlow). While state-of-the-art mechanisms add up to 17MB of monitoring data, our solution causes an overhead of only 25KB. Also, the implemented prototype takes less than 0.40ms to identify elephant flows with a 95% accuracy in scenarios with scarce memory resources.