P4 Postcard Telemetry Collector in Packet-Optical Networks

Next generation 5G services will require accurate service level verification including the packet-optical metro/aggregation segment. Network telemetry enables such accurate monitoring exploiting in-band and postcard telemetry technologies. However, the massive collection of telemetry data from the network and its processing represent a potential bottleneck subject to scalability issues. In this paper, we propose a two-stage telemetry collector by offloading the postcard telemetry reports processing and aggregation to a programmable P4 switch performing aggregation and correlation to be potentially per-formed at wirespeed. The experimental evaluation highlights the benefits in terms of reduced CPU and bandwidth requirements at the telemetry server.