Millions of little minions

Abstract

This paper presents a practical approach to rapidly introducing new dataplane functionality into networks: End-hosts embed tiny programs into packets to actively query and manipulate a network's internal state. We show how this "tiny packet program" (TPP) interface gives end-hosts unprecedented visibility into network behavior, enabling them to work with the network to achieve a desired functionality. Our design leverages what each component does best: (a) switches forward and execute tiny packet programs (at most 5 instructions) in-band at line rate, and (b) end-hosts perform arbitrary (and easily updated) computation on network state. By implementing three different research proposals, we show that TPPs are useful. Using a hardware prototype on a NetFPGA, we show our design is feasible at a reasonable cost.

IntSight

“…Adaptating Existing Approaches. To enable the comparison to IntSight, considering our problem constraints (i.e., no modification to end-hosts), we made the following adaptations to TPP [20] and SwitchPointer [27]. We adapted TPP to extract the collected telemetry information at the end of a packet's path and send it directly to an analyzer server.…”

“…Monitoring assisted by end-hosts. TPP [20] and SwitchPointer [27], techniques proposed in the context of data center networks, investigated involving end-hosts in monitoring tasks such as analysis and storage of measurement data. Since hosts lack visibility into the network, to pinpoint and diagnose problems, these techniques build upon the concept of in-band network telemetry (INT) [21].…”

“…Active measurement techniques (e.g., ping, traceroute, OWAMP [26], and TWAMP [17]) also do not provide sufficient time resolution; additionally, there is no guarantee that the network will route and prioritize probes in the same way as production packets. The consistent move towards heterogeneity in the treatment of traffic [18,20], multi-path routing [19,22], and flowlet load balancing [1,16] exacerbates this limitation.…”

“…Packet sampling, their common method for addressing this challenge, inherently leads these techniques to occasionally miss important events. Recent work on datacenter networks (e.g., TPP [20] and SwitchPointer [27]) attempt to strike a balance between bandwidth and processing overheads by combining in-band network telemetry (INT) [21] (i.e., collection of device metadata by production packets) and analysis tasks by end-hosts. However, control over end-hosts by network operators is undesirable and even impossible in many cases.…”

IncBricks

“…in order to support tasks such as congestion control, network measurement, troubleshooting, and verification. Minions [28] proposes embedding tiny processors in the switch data plane to run small, restricted programs embedded in packets to query and manipulate the state of the network. Smart Packets [46] explores a similar idea but in the switch control plane, with fewer restrictions on what could be executed, making it harder to sustain line rate.…”