SteadySketch: A High-Performance Algorithm for Finding Steady Flows in Data Streams

In this paper, we study steady flows in data streams, which refers to the flows whose arrival rate is always non-zero and around a fixed value for several consecutive time windows. To find steady flows in real time, we propose a novel sketch-based algorithm, SteadySketch, aiming to accurately report steady flows with limited memory. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to define and find steady flows in data streams. The key novelty of SteadySketch is our proposed reborn technique, which reduces the memory requirement by 75%. Our theoretical proofs show that the negative impact of the reborn technique is small. Experimental results show that, compared with the two comparison schemes, SteadySketch improves the Precision Rate (PR) by around 79.5% and 82.8%, and reduces the Average Relative Error (ARE) by around $905.9\times $ and $657.9\times $ , respectively. Finally, we provide three concrete cases: cache prefetch, Redis and P4 implementation. As we will demonstrate, SteadySketch can effectively improve the cache hit ratio while achieving satisfying performance on both Redis and Tofino switches. All related codes of SteadySketch are available at GitHub.