OmniWindow: A General and Efficient Window Mechanism Framework for Network Telemetry
Haifeng Sun, Jiaheng Li, Jintao He, Jie Gui, Qun Huang
Abstract
Recent network telemetry solutions typically target programmable switches to achieve high performance and in-network visibility. They partition the packet stream into windows and then apply various stream processing techniques to summarize flow-level statistics. However, existing studies focus on the measurement within each window. Window management is still a missing piece due to the resource limitation of programmable switches. In this paper, we propose OmniWindow, a general and efficient window mechanism framework. OmniWindow splits the original window into fine-grained sub-windows such that the sub-windows can be merged into various window types. To deal with the resource restriction, OmniWindow carefully designs its data plane memory layout and proposes a window synchronization method. It also employs a collaborative architecture that can collect and reset stateful data in sub-windows within a limited time. We prototype OmniWindow on Tofino. We incorporate OmniWindow into a SOTA query-driven telemetry system and eight sketch-based telemetry algorithms. Our experiments demonstrate that OmniWindow enables these telemetry solutions to achieve higher accuracy than conventional window mechanism.