Ring Sketch:A Generic, Low-Complexity, and Hardware-Friendly Traffic Measurement Framework over Sliding Windows

Traffic measurement is essential for network management. Sliding window models can provide network management tasks with flow statistics within the most recent window at any moment. However, most existing solutions over sliding windows are not designed for traffic measurement scenarios, therefore they have higher complexity and cannot be implemented on programmable hardware switches. To address the issues, we designed Ring Sketch, which is a generic, low-complexity, and hardware-friendly traffic measurement framework over sliding windows. Ring Sketch can not only be easily implemented on programmable hardware switches but can also accurately answer typical flow statistics queries by using different sketches. Then we propose the estimation strategies for Ring Sketch and theoretically analyze its error bounds. At last, we implement Ring Sketch on OVS-DPDK and a programmable hardware switch with a Tofino chip, and all the source codes are released on GitHub. The experimental results show that Ring Sketch has a throughput over 3x higher than the state-of-the-art Sliding Sketch, and in typical measurement tasks, Ring Sketch can achieve high measurement accuracy.