A MapReduce Approach for Traffic Matrix Estimation in SDN

A traffic matrix (TM) is a source of critical traffic throughput information for traffic engineering activities and network management tasks such as traffic prediction, capacity planning, network provisioning, and anomaly detection. However, estimating TM poses several challenges for network engineers. One of the challenges is that traffic data statistics are constantly changing, and their aggregation for real-time monitoring becomes a difficult task. This paper presents a near real-time TM estimation approach for OpenFlow (OF) networks. It makes use of Big Data techniques based on MapReduce operations to tackle the aggregation problem. The proposed method uses traffic data statistics collected from OF switches through an SDN controller as input and aggregates these data in a Big Data streaming processing environment. This paper explores the benefits of the distributed MapReduce computing model to provide an estimate of the TM for all origin-destination (OD) pairs of hosts in the network in two ways: 1) the accumulated throughput and 2) the throughput between two sequential TM estimates. This procedure enables network engineers to monitor the behavior and evolution of the throughput on each OD pair in the network and on each link in the path between each OD pair. The generated TM is persisted in a NoSQL database and can be made available for a variety of network traffic monitoring applications. The results of the simulations show the potential of the proposed MapReduce approach for TM estimation.