EffiView: Trigger-Based Monitoring Approach with Low Cost in SDN

With the vigorous development of network applications, typical SDN (Software Defined Networks) such as data centers are gradually carrying more and more complex network traffic. This poses a great challenge for network monitoring — how to realize real-time, high-accuracy capture of traffic changes at low cost. In this paper, we propose a trigger-based monitoring approach called EffiView. This approach provides three ways to monitor flow statistics, including flow-stat triggering, FlowRemoved parsing and active polling. The flow-stat triggering can occur on all multiples of the presupposed flow-stat threshold for each flow entry. The latter two ways are complementary to the flow-stat triggering. FlowRemoved parsing is used to acquire flow statistics from FlowRemoved messages and active polling is conditionally carried out by the controller at the expiration of monitoring period. EffiView achieves low-cost monitoring by combining the three ways efficiently, while ensuring high accuracy and fine granularity. Based on the NetMagic platform, We implement EffiView and evaluate its monitoring performance. The experimental results show that EffiView can reach great advantages over traditional monitoring approaches.