Felix: Implementing Traffic Measurement on End Hosts Using Program Analysis

Network measurement is an essential component of many SDN applications, but most existing controller platforms force programmers to implement measurement tasks by installing fine-grained forwarding rules on switches---an approach that significantly increases configuration and management complexity. This paper proposes a radically different approach: rather than implementing measurement tasks directly on network switches, we argue for pushing measurement to the edge and utilizing the abundant resources available on end hosts. At a technical level, our approach is based on two key ideas: (i) we express measurement tasks using programs in a high-level, declarative query language, and (ii) we use program analysis to calculate predicates that can be used to answer queries at the edge of the network. We present an implementation of our approach on top of the NetKAT framework, we develop case studies illustrating the benefits of our approach, and we conduct experiments that quantify performance on realistic benchmarks.