Hardware Modules for Packet Interarrival Time Monitoring for Software Defined Measurements

Measurement and tracking have crucial roles in Software-Defined Networks (SDNs). Unfortunately, most of procedures and techniques to perform measurements and monitoring tasks are implemented in software at network end-hosts. Despite the large use, a software based approach generates imprecision, high costs, and makes monitoring more difficult. In this paper, we extend OpenFlow switch to implement a measurement architecture for SDN. Our system performs measurements in a simple and scalable way without depending on end-hosts. It allows monitoring the performance at the granularity of flows. Moreover, our system also enables software-defined measurements can collect flow's statistics on the fly. We have prototyped our architecture on the NetFPGA platform and, as an initial case study, we have implemented a module to measure packet interarrival time. This module has been validated in a realistic testbed. Our results demonstrate that the proposed architecture presents a negligible difference when compared to measurements performed by software at end-hosts.