A Bandwidth-Efficient INT System for Tracking the Rules Matched by the Packets of a Flow

Abstract

Tracking the rules matched by the packets of a flow when they traverse multiple switches in a network is very important and useful. In this paper, we design and implement a bandwidth-efficient In-Band Network Telemetry (INT) system that can track the rules matched by the packets of a flow in real time or in the past. We have evaluated the real performance of our system on a testbed composed of several hardware P4 switches. Our experimental results show that the system works correctly and its traffic reduction scheme can reduce the rate of generated INT reports by a factor of 39, 394, 2,055, or even up to 12,500, depending on the type of network states monitored and the threshold used to filter out less important INT reports.