A Modular Traffic Sampling Architecture: Bringing Versatility and Efficiency to Massive Traffic Analysis

The massive traffic volumes and heterogeneity of services in today’s networks urge for flexible, yet simple measurement solutions to assist network management tasks, without impairing network performance. To turn treatable tasks requiring traffic analysis, sampling the traffic has become mandatory, triggering substantial research in the area. Despite that, there is still a lack of an encompassing solution able to support the flexible deployment of sampling techniques in production networks, adequate to diverse traffic scenarios and measurement activities. In this context, this article proposes a modular traffic sampling architecture able to foster the flexible design and deployment of efficient measurement strategies. The architecture is composed of three layers—management plane, control plane and data plane—covering key components to achieve versatile and lightweight measurements in diverse traffic scenarios and measurement activities. Each component of the architecture is described considering the different strategies, technologies and protocols that compose the several stages of a measurement process. Following the proposed architecture, a sampling framework prototype has been developed, providing a fair environment to assess and compare sampling techniques under distinct measurement scenarios, evaluating their performance in balancing computational burden and accuracy. The results have demonstrated the relevance and applicability of the proposed architecture, revealing that a modular and configurable approach to sampling is a step forward for improving sampling scope and efficiency.