MpScope: Enabling multi-pipeline monitoring inside a switch

Abstract

The core of programmable switches is the flexible data plane, composed of multiple programmable pipelines in existing programmable switches. These pipelines are isolated from each other and cannot share state and data. However, most of network monitoring systems ignore this condition and implicitly assume that the switch has only a single pipeline. This results in an inaccurate measurement and high communication overhead with the practical switch. To tackle this problem, we propose MpScope, a general multi-pipeline monitoring framework, which centers around the control plane, supporting accurate and efficient network monitoring. Specifically, MpScope combines the switch’s data plane and control plane to achieve comprehensive network monitoring of the whole switch scope. The control plane aggregates the statistical results from multiple pipelines and tunes the monitoring module residing in the different pipelines in the data plane dynamically. The data plane is responsible for real-time traffic measurement and statistic reports. Its behaviors can be adjusted periodically with the instructions from the control plane. Two typical monitoring applications, i.e., heavy hitter detection and distinct counting, are developed with MpScope to validate the effectiveness of multi-pipeline monitoring. Experiments show that MpScope significantly reduces communication overhead compared to the static threshold scheme while maintaining high detection accuracy over time.