Instrumenting Open vSwitch with Monitoring Capabalities: Designs and Challenges

Published

March 28, 2018

Author(s)

Zili Zha, An Wang, Yang Guo, Douglas C. Montgomery, Songqing Chen

Abstract

The recent advances on Software-Defined Networking (SDN) have made flexible and programmable network measurement possible. A promising trend is to conduct network traffic measurement on the widely deployed Open vSwitches (OVS) in data centers. However, little attention has been paid to the various options and trade-offs for conducting traffic measurement on the OVSes. In this study, we set to explore the different design choices and investigate the corresponding trade- offs among the resource consumption, the measurement accuracy, the implementation complexity, and the impact on the switching speed. For this purpose, we empirically design and implement four different measurement schemes in OVS, by either closely integrating forwarding and measurement functions into a pipeline, or decoupling them into parallel operations. Through extensive experiments and comparisons, we quantitatively show the various trade-offs that the different schemes strike to balance, and demonstrate the feasibility of instrumenting OVS with monitoring capabilities. These results provide valuable insights and options for various measurement and monitoring needs.

Proceedings Title

The Symposium on SDN Research (SOSR), 2018

Conference Dates

March 28-29, 2018

Conference Location

Los Angeles, CA

Pub Type

Conferences

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DOI Link

Keywords

instrumentation, OVS, monitoring

Citation

Zha, Z. , Wang, A. , Guo, Y. , Montgomery, D. and Chen, S. (2018), Instrumenting Open vSwitch with Monitoring Capabalities: Designs and Challenges, The Symposium on SDN Research (SOSR), 2018, Los Angeles, CA, [online], https://doi.org/10.1145/3185467.3185478 (Accessed October 8, 2025)