Simple Active Mechanisms for Measuring and Monitoring Service Level Topologies

Abstract

Whether driven by security concerns, need for flexibility, deployment of advanced services or as a simplified outsourcing model, overlaying a virtual service topology over the underlying network infrastructure is common. To ensure and enforce consistent service quality, fairness and protocol behavior it is necessary to measure and monitor these service level topologies. In this paper we present extensible general purpose mechanisms to monitor and measure characteristics of a service level topology at the nodes of the topology. The mechanisms provide means to dynamically deploy a distributed observation function at the nodes of the topology and to collate the observations into a result given to the requestor on a subscription channel. These are control plane mechanisms, outside of the router datapath, where we assume programmability and low cost memory. We give several examples of how to use these mechanisms to compute interesting properties of the topology.

gTrace: Simple Mechanisms for Monitoring of Multicast Sessions

“…Although in this paper we focus on gTrace for a single source distribution trees, we have experimented with extension to gTrace for more general topologies and overlays [19].…”

On requirements and challenges of future network nodes

“…In [17,18] the authors examine the potential of using overlays to improve robustness and consistent reachability, a functionality ascribed to the distributed control plane, as is the case in [19].…”

“…The distributed control plane implements the multicast protocol daemon, the gTrace measurement protocol [19], and the autonomic adaptation control (changing forwarding priorities, activating retransmission, fast rebuild under failures, self-optimization of distribution tree).…”