Newton: Intent-driven network traffic monitoring

Abstract

Monitoring network traffic based on operators' intents is essential to today's networks. As the bandwidth and size of networks increase steeply, monitoring systems shall fulfill the requirements of on-demand network monitoring for ever-growing traffic volumes. However, existing monitoring systems either cannot satisfy operators' intents on demand or introduce substantial monitoring overheads. In this paper, we present Newton, an intent-driven traffic monitor that enables specifying operators' intents with traffic monitoring queries and supports dynamic and scalable network-wide queries. Specifically, Newton 1) empowers operators to dynamically create, remove, and update on-data-plane queries without interrupting normal packet forwarding, 2) conducts systematic optimizations to achieve precise network traffic monitoring, and 3) executes network-wide queries with high resilience to dynamic network status. Evaluation results show that Newton improves the flexibility, scalability, and resource efficiency of traffic monitoring, demonstrating its great potential to be deployed in large-scale programmable networks.