A High-Performance and Accurate FPGA-Based Flow Monitor for 100 Gbps Networks

Abstract

Network monitoring is important to improve network performance and security. The separation of the data plane and the control plane of SDN gives the network flexibility. This flexibility facilitates network management and gives rise to the need for accurate and fine-grained management of networks. However, the traditional software-based flow monitoring cannot easily keep up with today’s high-speed networks such as 100 GbE, even with the help of high-performance frameworks such as DPDK. To meet the need for fine-grained management of high-speed networks, an accurate hardware-based flow monitor design is presented in this paper. In our design, the FPGA-based pipelined cuckoo hashing is used to achieve efficient storage of flow entries. The flow information is accurately recorded without any sampling. The proposed design can achieve a higher performance than the non-sketch CPU-based methods and higher accuracy than sketch methods. Compared with other state-of-the-art flow monitors, the proposed design can achieve a performance of 100 Gbps while maintaining high accuracy.