Abstract
Nowadays, with the fast development of backbone networks, performance monitoring and troubleshooting on IP-over-optical networks have become increasingly important. However, a real-time monitoring scheme, which is programmable to reveal the end-to-end multilayer information of an arbitrary flow in an IP-over-optical network, is still absent. Also, for such a monitoring scheme, how to balance the tradeoff between the accuracy and the overhead has not been studied yet. To address these challenges, we design a P4-based flexible multilayer in-band network telemetry (ML-INT) system to visualize an IP-over-optical network in real time. Specifically, the flexible ML-INT scheme only selects a small portion of packets in an IP flow to encode INT headers, while each INT header only contains a part of the statistics of all the electrical/optical network elements (NEs) on the flow’s routing path. We design the packet processing pipelines for the scheme, program P4-based hardware programmable data-plane (PDP) switches to implement the pipelines, develop the optical performance monitors that can cooperate with the PDP switches to facilitate ML-INT, and implement a high-performance data analyzer that can extract, parse, and analyze the INT data carried by the high-speed IP flows [i.e., with an arrival rate up to 2 million packets per second (Mp/s)]. The whole flexible ML-INT system is experimentally demonstrated in a small-scale but real IP-over-optical network testbed. The experimental results verify that our proposal only introduces very small overhead and can make the IP-over-optical network more visible in real time for performance monitoring and troubleshooting.
Highlights
With the development of emerging network services, both the traffic and infrastructure of backbone networks are undergoing dramatic changes [1]
We develop optical performance monitors that can cooperate with the programmable data-plane (PDP) switches to facilitate multilayer in-band network telemetry (ML-in-band network telemetry (INT))
The SmartNICs are based on NFP-4000 network processor units (NPUs) that can be programmed by both P4 and Micro C, while the programmable ASIC switch is the 3.2 Tbps Barefoot switch with a Tofino ASIC that can be programmed by P4
Summary
With the development of emerging network services, both the traffic and infrastructure of backbone networks are undergoing dramatic changes [1]. To the best of our knowledge, there is no reference design to resolve the first challenge, since multilayer monitoring needs to collect comprehensive and realtime statistics regarding both electrical/optical network elements (NEs) on an arbitrary flow’s routing path. Only extending the INT header fields defined in [27] to include optical parameters is far from enough This is because encoding the statistics of all the electrical/optical NEs on a path as INT fields and inserting them in packet headers would lead to excessive bandwidth overheads.
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