vPROM: VSwitch enhanced programmable measurement in SDN

Abstract

While being critical to the network management, the current state of the art in network measurement is inadequate, providing surprisingly little visibility into detailed network behaviors and often requiring high level of manual intervention to operate. Such a practice becomes increasingly ineffective as the networks grow both in size and complexity. In this paper, we propose vPROM, a vSwitch enhanced SDN programmable measurement framework that automates the measurement process, minimizes the measurement resource usage, and addresses several significant technical challenges faced by early works. vPROM leverages the SDN programmability and extends the Pyretic runtime system and OpenFlow network interface to achieve the measurement automation. The required measurement resources are minimized by only acquiring the necessary statistics, made possible with instrumented Open vSwitches1 with user defined monitoring capability. By decoupling monitoring from routing, vPROM reduces the interference between the measurement applications and other applications, and eliminates the frequent involvement of the controller. A vPROM prototype is implemented with DDoS and port-scan detection applications. The performance of vPROM is evaluated and the comparison results with other existing programmable measurement approaches are also presented.