Towards Software Defined Measurement in Data Centers: A Comparative Study of Designs, Implementation, and Evaluation

Cloud data centers are increasingly adopting the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) technologies for their underlying connection and communications. However, as a critical part of daily operations and management of such data centers, the network measurement is essential but has often been constrained by the available resources in the traditional network devices. Thus, how to properly balance the resource consumption while maintain timely and accurate measurement remains a challenge to data center systems. Recent advances in Software-Defined Networking (SDN) have enabled flexible and programmable network measurement, which is referred to as Software Defined Measurement (SDM). A promising trend for SDM is to conduct network traffic measurement on widely deployed Open vSwitches (OVS) in data centers. However, little attention has been paid to the design options for conducting traffic measurement on the OVS. In this study, we set to explore different designs and investigate the corresponding trade-offs among resource consumption, measurement accuracy, implementation complexity, and impact on switching speed. Through extensive experiments and comparisons, we quantitatively show the various trade-offs that the different schemes strike to balance, and demonstrate the feasibility of instrumenting OVS with monitoring capabilities. These results provide valuable insights into which design will best serve different measurement and monitoring needs.