P4-Based Proactive Monitoring Scheme in Software-Defined Networks

The advent of Programming Protocol-independent Packet Processors (P4) enables the programmability of data planes, which provides not only further flexibility but also the possibility of the emergence of new features. With programmable data planes, network monitoring functionalities can be evolved beyond the conventional mechanism of Software-Defined Networks (SDN) which is polling-based monitoring based on OpenFlow. Although the polling-based method is easy and simple to collect monitoring information, it can cause substantial monitoring overhead on both the controller side and the switch side. Unlike the OpenFlow-based SDN which has one option to collect pre-defined information using the polling-based method, monitoring performance can be improved by applying new monitoring approaches based on P4. In this paper, a novel mechanism referred to as P4-based Proactive Monitoring (PPM) is proposed in order to enhance the efficiency of monitoring collection operations. PPM scheme adopts a proactive approach which allows programmable switches to proactively forward monitoring information to the controller after the controller enables PPM. The measurement results show that PPM can not only enhance the efficiency of collecting monitoring information by applying a proactive mechanism but also minimize the general monitoring overhead compared to the polling-based method.