Newton: Intent-Driven Network Traffic Monitoring

Abstract

Network monitoring systems are designed to fulfill operators’ intents and serve as essential tools to modern networks. As a result of rapidly increasing network bandwidth and scale nowadays, network monitors should satisfy on-demand network monitoring for continuously growing traffic volumes. However, existing monitoring systems either cannot satisfy flexible intents on demand or produce significant overheads. In this paper, we present <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Newton</i> , an intent-driven traffic monitor that is able to specify operators’ intents with traffic monitoring queries and conduct dynamic and scalable network-wide queries deployment. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Newton</i> enables operators to customize and modify queries dynamically without interrupting the network workflow. Besides, <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Newton</i> proposes systematic optimizations at device level and network-wide level to reduce resource consumption while deploying queries. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Newton</i> can combine the resources across switches to deploy complex queries with high resilience to dynamic network status. Evaluations prove that <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Newton</i> is of high flexibility, scalability, and resource efficiency, which demonstrates <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Newton</i> is promising to be deployed in large-scale programmable networks.