Identifying elephant flows by building a Reversible Counting Bloom Filter

Identifying elephant flows is very important in developing effective and efficient traffic engineering schemes. In addition, obtaining the statistics of these flows is also very useful for network operation and management. In this paper, we propose a novel method to identify elephant flows by introducing a Reversible Counting Bloom Filter (RCBF), a special Counting Bloom Filter. The RCBF consists of 6 Hash functions which projectively select some consecutive bits from original strings as function values. We obtain the information of elephant flow using the overlapping of hash bit strings of the RCBF and heavy-tailed feature of flow distribution. The theoretical analysis and experiment results show that this method can precisely and efficiently identify elephant flows.

[1]  Yossi Matias,et al.  Spectral bloom filters , 2003, SIGMOD '03.

[2]  Larry Peterson,et al.  Inter-AS traffic patterns and their implications , 1999, Seamless Interconnection for Universal Services. Global Telecommunications Conference. GLOBECOM'99. (Cat. No.99CH37042).

[3]  George Varghese,et al.  New directions in traffic measurement and accounting: Focusing on the elephants, ignoring the mice , 2003, TOCS.

[4]  Anja Feldmann,et al.  Deriving traffic demands for operational IP networks: methodology and experience , 2001, TNET.

[5]  Carsten Lund,et al.  Estimating flow distributions from sampled flow statistics , 2003, SIGCOMM '03.

[6]  Abhishek Kumar,et al.  Space-code bloom filter for efficient traffic flow measurement , 2003, IMC '03.

[7]  Shigeki Goto,et al.  Identifying elephant flows through periodically sampled packets , 2004, IMC '04.

[8]  Shigeki Goto,et al.  On the characteristics of Internet traffic variability: spikes and elephants , 2004, 2004 International Symposium on Applications and the Internet. Proceedings..

[9]  Eddie Kohler,et al.  Observed structure of addresses in IP traffic , 2006, TNET.