Compiling path queries in software-defined networks

Monitoring the flow of traffic along network paths is essential for SDN programming and troubleshooting. For example, traffic engineering requires measuring the ingress-egress traffic matrix; debugging a congested link requires determining the set of sources sending traffic through that link; and locating a faulty device might involve detecting how far along a path the traffic makes progress. Past path-based monitoring systems operate by diverting packets to collectors that perform "after-the-fact" analysis, at the expense of large data-collection overhead. In this paper, we show how to do more efficient "during-the-fact" analysis. We introduce a query language that allows each SDN application to specify queries independently of the forwarding state or the queries of other applications. The queries use a regular-expression-based path language that includes SQL-like "groupby" constructs for count aggregation. We track the packet trajectory directly on the data plane by converting the regular expressions into an automaton, and tagging the automaton state (i.e., the path prefix) in each packet as it progresses through the network. The SDN policies that implement the path queries can be combined with arbitrary packet-forwarding policies supplied by other elements of the SDN platform. A preliminary evaluation of our prototype shows that our "during-the-fact" strategy reduces data-collection overhead over "after-the-fact" strategies.