AIIN: An APN-Integrated Approach Toward Reactive Telemetry Notification for IFIT

In situ flow information telemetry (IFIT) is a state-of-the-art in-band telemetry framework for operator networks and can serve as the information foundation for network intelligence in the emerging sixth-generation regime. However, the performance advantage of IFIT comes at the cost of excessive telemetry data notification overhead, which makes it challenging to promote IFIT extensively. Therefore, we propose an approach named APN-integrated IFIT information notification (AIIN) to provide data notification overhead adaptability to IFIT. AIIN introduces a requirement-aware capability and reactive differentiated treatment into IFIT. In AIIN, we first enhance application-aware networking (APN) and integrate it into IFIT notification to support the explicit expression of data notification requirements. Then, oriented toward the different timeliness (telemetry data lag time) and accuracy (telemetry data retention rate) requirements expressed in APN, we design different behavioral treatment models to define reactive functions and procedures to make network devices explicitly process these requirements without decisions. The AIIN prototype is implemented on P4 switches. We also deploy the prototype on the China Environment for Network Innovation (CENI) network. Emulation results show that AIIN can achieve nanosecond line speed performance with differentiated and reactive data notification overhead reduction and, in the best case, can reduce bandwidth occupation by approximately 84%.