Eliminating Control Plane Overload via Measurement Task Placement

Abstract

Recent efforts in network measurement place measurement tasks on programmable switches to measure high-speed traffic. These tasks extract flow data, i.e., events, from packets and send events to the control plane. However, the tasks may generate massive events in a short time. In this context, the links transferring events to the control plane and the control plane servers that handle events may be overloaded, i.e., control plane overload. None of existing solutions can eliminate control plane overload. In this paper, we propose, a framework that eliminates control plane overload via careful measurement task placement. Our key idea is to allocate enough resources for each task during task placement to avoid control plane overload at runtime. For each task, estimates its maximum possible rate of sending events to the control plane. Then its optimization framework addresses the resource restrictions of both switches and the control plane. The experiments on Tofino switches indicate that outperforms existing solutions with higher accuracy in several use cases.