This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Traffic measurement is central to network operation, management, and security. Yet, support for measurement was not an integral part of the original Internet architecture. This project aims to develop a programmable measurement architecture that is versatile enough to support current and future measurement needs, adaptable to dynamic network conditions, modular/lightweight, and scalable to high link speeds.
This project proposes a new flow abstraction module and query language that can specify arbitrary traffic sub-populations for statistics collection. Efficient data structures to encode these queries will be developed. The team also strives to identify a core set of data streaming and sampling primitives that can be composed together to satisfy most of the queries. Efficient hardware implementation for these core set of primitives will constitute the basic measurement modules that can be easily reconfigured to measure traffic at different desired granularity. Measurement application case studies will be carried out to evaluate and showcase the capabilities of the proposed approach.
This project has great potential in guiding the design of a clean-slate measurement instrumentation for future Internet. It will provide both graduate and undergraduate students with training that span multiple disciplines, from fundamental statistical theory, algorithm design, to hardware implementation. The results (including the query language and underlying data structures, sampling/streaming algorithms, and hardware building blocks) will be broadly disseminated through publications, invited talks/tutorials, and open-sourcing software distribution.
