Lightweight Network-Wide Telemetry Without Explicitly Using Probe Packets

In-band Network Telemetry (INT) enables hop-by-hop device-internal state exposure for reliably maintaining and troubleshooting networks. For achieving network-wide telemetry, high-level orchestration over the INT primitive is further needed. Existing solutions either incur significant bandwidth overhead or fail to promptly handle link failures. In this work, we propose INT-label, a lightweight network-wide telemetry architecture without introducing probe packets. INT-label periodically labels device states onto sampled packets, which is cost-effective with minuscule bandwidth overhead and seamlessly adapts to topology changes. Preliminary evaluation on software P4 switches BMv2 suggests that INT-label can achieve 98.54% network-wide visibility coverage under a label frequency of 100 times per second.