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Monitoring very high speed links. Gianluca Iannaccone Sprint ATL joint work with: Christophe Diot – Sprint ATL Ian Graham – University of Waikato Nick McKeown – Stanford University. Packet-level trace collection: the DAG example.
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Monitoring very high speed links Gianluca Iannaccone Sprint ATL joint work with: Christophe Diot – Sprint ATL Ian Graham – University of Waikato Nick McKeown – Stanford University
Packet-level trace collection: the DAG example • Optical splitter to divert part of the signal toward the capture card. • The capture card stores a record with a timestamp for each packet. • The card uses the PCI bus to transfer the records to the host main memory. • It is used by the Sprint IP Monitoring Project. IMW 2001
Challenges for next generation capture devices • PCI bus throughput: • PCI 66Mhz/64bit is already challenged at OC-48 speed. • Storage capacity and data management: • Several terabytes per trace collection. • Memory access speed. • Disk array speed: • OC-192 would require roughly 250Mbytes/sec (64 byte records, 300 byte average packet size). IMW 2001
Challenges for next generation capture devices (cont’d) • Deployment of extensive monitoring facilities inside the routers: • Backplane speeds are in the order of hundreds of Gbps; • Stringent power and space constraints; • Switched backplanes reduce the advantage of being inside the router. IMW 2001
Our Goals • Be capable of collecting packet at OC-192 speed with the current PCI technology. • Develop a 4:1 compression technique. • Minimize the loss of information due to compression. IMW 2001
System requirements • Online processing required for compression. • At OC-192 speed (10Gbps), a new packet arrives every 240ns (300-byte packets). • We can assume large average packet sizes because we can buffer incoming packets (once timestamped). IMW 2001
From packet traces to flow traces • Store information at the flow-level: • a flow is defined by the usual 5-tuple. • Flow information are shared among all the packets belonging to the same flow. • Store few information per packet: • packet arrival time; • size; • sequence numbers • … IMW 2001
Flow and packet records TCP: 28 bytes/flow; 16 bytes/pkt; UDP: 20 bytes/flow; 12 bytes/pkt; Other: 16 bytes/flow; 12 bytes/pkt; IMW 2001
Flow termination • Records of terminated flows are dumped to the host memory (and then to disk). • Flow termination relies on a timeout: • A short timeout will require less memory; • A long timeout will give better compression rates; • Anyway, the timeout does not affect the accuracy of the system because we can post-process the trace; IMW 2001
Flow fragmentation • Long-lived flows can be a problem: • Large records and high bursts of traffic on the PCI bus; • We set a limit to memory occupancy for a flow record (with relative packet records): • If the memory limit is exceeded, the Record Number is increased and the record is stored. • When the flow terminates the entire record is stored to disk with the Last Record flag set. IMW 2001
Memory required IMW 2001
Preliminary performance study • We have built a simple emulator to compress a packet-level trace. • 5 different traces with different link utilizations and traffic patterns. • Compression rates ranging between 3.20 and 4.02 (compared to DAG3 packet traces). IMW 2001
Hardware architecture • Steps required in trace collection: • process framing information; • timestamp the packet; • classify the packet; • update flow/packet record; • store terminated flows to disk (background); • All these steps can be pipelined: • Each step can be performed during the interval between two packet arrivals. IMW 2001
Packet classification • May be very expensive in terms of computation time and resources: • One-to-one mapping between packets and flows. • But a simple hash function may be enough: • Requires a large amount of fast memory; • Collisions can be solved using a second hash function or a lookup trie. IMW 2001
Conclusion • New compression techniques are necessary to monitor OC-192/OC-768 links. • We have proposed a novel scheme for flow-based trace collection. • We have shown how to achieve compression ratio of 4:1 without losing much information. IMW 2001
Open issues and future work • Detailed cost analysis (chipsets, memory). • Packet classification performance. • Second stage of record compression. • Techniques to cope with traffic anomalies. • Sampling techniques. IMW 2001