In Band Network Telemetry Overhead Reduction Based on Data Flows Sampling and Recovering

Abstract

In band Network Telemetry (INT) is a technique aiming at collecting telemetry information by inserting it inside the data packets, instead of relying on classical centralized monitoring elements that periodically query the network devices. The main drawback of INT is represented by the introduced per-packet overhead, that could negatively affect some traffic flows, especially those having stringent QoS requirements. To deal with the increase in the packet length caused by INT, in this paper we introduce the Sampling and Recovering paradigm to overcome the classical Collect Everything approach where all the INT data must be gathered. The proposed approach hinges on signal processing strategies to sample and recover sparse flow signals. The key idea is to reduce the number of INT data to collect and exploit signal reconstruction algorithms to obtain the unseen samples. The preliminary performance evaluation shows that the 18% of INT data are enough to get an accurate reconstruction of the overall network situation, while allowing for 90% of overhead reduction with respect to the Collect Everything case.