Seamless Dynamic Reconfiguration of Flow Meters: Requirements and Solutions

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the need for seamless dynamic reconfiguration of flow meters. Flow monitoring has become a primary measurement approach for various network management and security applications. Sampling and filtering techniques are usually employed in order to cope with the increasing bandwidth in today’s backbone networks. Additionally, low level analysis features can be used if CPU and memory resources are available. Obviously, the configuration of such algorithms depends on the (estimated) network load. In case of changing traffic pattern or varying demands on the flow analyzers, this configuration needs to be updated. Hereby it is essential to lose as little information, i.e. packet or flow data, as possible. We contribute to this domain by presenting an architecture for seamless reconfiguration without information loss, which we integrated into the monitoring toolkit Vermont. Additionally, we integrated support for situation awareness using module specific resource sensors. In a number of experiments, we evaluated the performance of Vermont and similar flow monitors.