FlowTracer: An Effective Flow Trajectory Detection Solution Based on Probabilistic Packet Tagging in SDN-Enabled Networks

Currently, parallel data transmissions in large-scale datacenter networks are becoming increasingly crucial to application performance. Despite fine-grained control by SDN-enabled networks, some transmission errors, such as misconfigurations, will inevitably occur, resulting in high-level forwarding policies that cannot be conformed to at the data plane. Therefore, flow trajectory detection is very important for allowing datacenter network operators to troubleshoot problems and ensure that all traffic flows are running on the correct paths. However, existing solutions detect flow trajectories by recording the entire path of each packet. These methods are prone to imposing significant overheads in terms of both the number of switch entries and the amount of packet header space required. To considerably reduce this overhead, we present FlowTracer, an efficient flow trajectory detection solution, which can sample a path one link at a time instead of recording the entire path. FlowTracer consists of a method of probabilistic packet tagging and a method of trajectory reconstruction. In this paper, we first introduce the method of probabilistic packet tagging, which is performed in OpenFlow-enabled switches with very few switch entries and limited packet header space by means of double VLAN tags. Then, we explore the topological structure of datacenter networks and propose our method of trajectory reconstruction, which is performed at end hosts and achieves rapid convergence. Finally, we evaluate FlowTracer on a 48-ary fat-tree topology. The results show that FlowTracer can detect trajectories quickly while placing far smaller demands on both switch entries and packet header space than state-of-the-art techniques.