Sel-INT: A Runtime-Programmable Selective In-Band Network Telemetry System

It is known that by leveraging programmable data plane, in-band network telemetry (INT) can be realized to provide a powerful and promising method to collect realtime network statistics for monitoring and troubleshooting. However, existing INT implementations still exhibit a few drawbacks such as lack of runtime-programmability and relatively high overheads due to per-packet operation. In this work, we propose and design a runtime-programmable selective INT system, namely, Sel-INT, to resolve these issues. Specifically, we first design a runtime-programmable selective INT scheme based on protocol oblivious forwarding (POF), and then prototype our design by extending the famous OpenvSwitch (OVS) platform to obtain a software switch that supports Sel-INT and implementing a Data Analyzer to parse, extract and analyze the INT data. Our implementation of Sel-INT is verified and evaluated in a real network testbed that consists of a few stand-alone software switches. The experimental results demonstrate that Sel-INT can not only adjust the sampling rate of INT in runtime but also program the corresponding data types dynamically, and they also confirm that our proposal can ensure proper accuracy and timeliness for network monitoring while greatly reducing the overheads of INT.