A Machine Learning-based Real-time Monitoring System for Classification of Elephant Flows on KOREN

Abstract

With the advent and realization of Software Defined Network (SDN) architecture, many organizations are now shifting towards this paradigm. SDN brings more control, higher scalability, and serene elasticity. The SDN spontaneously changes the network configuration according to the dynamic network requirements inside the constrained environments. Therefore, a monitoring system that can monitor the physical and virtual entities is needed to operate this type of network technology with high efficiency and proficiency. In this manuscript, we propose a real-time monitoring system for data collection and visualization that includes the Prometheus, node exporter, and Grafana. A node exporter is configured on the physical devices to collect the physical and virtual entities resources utilization logs. A real-time Prometheus database is configured to collect and store the data from all the exporters. Furthermore, the Grafana is affixed with Prometheus to visualize the current network status and device provisioning. A monitoring system is deployed on the physical infrastructure of the KOREN topology. Data collected by the monitoring system is further pre-processed and restructured into a dataset. A monitoring system is further enhanced by including machine learning techniques applied on the formatted datasets to identify the elephant flows. Additionally, a Random Forest is trained on our generated labeled datasets, and the classification models' performance are verified using accuracy metrics.