Visualize Your IP-Over-Optical Network in Realtime: A P4-Based Flexible Multilayer In-Band Network Telemetry (ML-INT) System

Abstract

Nowadays, with the fast development of backbone networks, performance monitoring and troubleshooting on IP-over-optical networks have become increasingly important. However, a real-time monitoring scheme, which is programmable to reveal the end-to-end multilayer information of an arbitrary flow in an IP-over-optical network, is still absent. Also, for such a monitoring scheme, how to balance the tradeoff between the accuracy and the overhead has not been studied yet. To address these challenges, we design a P4-based flexible multilayer in-band network telemetry (ML-INT) system to visualize an IPover-optical network in real time. Specifically, the flexible ML-INT scheme only selects a small portion of packets in an IP flow to encode INT headers, while each INT header only contains a part of the statistics of all the electrical/optical network elements (NEs) on the flow's routing path. We design the packet processing pipelines for the scheme, program P4-based hardware programmable data-plane (PDP) switches to implement the pipelines, develop the optical performance monitors that can cooperate with the PDP switches to facilitate ML-INT, and implement a high-performance data analyzer that can extract, parse, and analyze the INT data carried by the high-speed IP flows [i.e., with an arrival rate up to 2 million packets per second (Mp/s)]. The whole flexible ML-INT system is experimentally demonstrated in a small-scale but real IP-over-optical network testbed. The experimental results verify that our proposal only introduces very small overhead and can make the IP-over-optical network more visible in real time for performance monitoring and troubleshooting. INDEX TERMS IP-over-optical network, multilayer in-band network telemetry (ML-INT), programmable data-plane (PDP). I. INTRODUCTION Recently, with the development of emerging network services, both the traffic and infrastructure of backbone networks are undergoing dramatic changes [1]. Specifically, the traffic has been not only growing exponentially in volume but also becoming increasingly bursty and dynamic [2], [3], and this has applied heavy pressure on the rigid IPover-optical infrastructure of backbone networks [4]-[6]. Therefore, network operators first need a much more flexible network architecture that can build dynamic lightpaths adaptively in the optical layer for time-variant traffic flows in The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Wei Quan.

An Exhaustive Survey on P4 Programmable Data Plane Switches: Taxonomy, Applications, Challenges, and Future Trends

“…• Reconfigurability: the parser and the processing logic can be redefined in the field. Variations [54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62] Collectors and Solutions [63][64][65][66][67] Congestion Control [68][69][70][71][72][73][74][75][76] Measurements AQM [99][100][101][102][103][104][105][106][107][108][109] QoS and TM [110][111][112][113][114] Multicast [115][116][117] Load Balancing [118][119][120][121][122][123][124][125]…”

“…Niu at al. [59] proposed multilayer INT (ML-INT), a system that visualizes IP-over-optical networks in realtime. The proposed system encodes INT headers in a subset of packets pertaining to an IP flow.…”

Passive In-Band Network Telemetry Systems: The Potential of Programmable Data Plane on Network-Wide Telemetry

“…The last INT-based contribution reviewed in this section focuses on IP-over-optical networks. Multi-Layer In-band Network Telemetry (ML-INT) [48] defines a P4-based flexible INT-based system that treats IP and optical levels jointly for monitoring and troubleshooting in real-time.…”

Extending P4 in-band telemetry to user equipment for latency- and localization-aware autonomous networking with AI forecasting

“…based on Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). A second example is the P4-based In-band Network Telemetry (INT) which enables the monitoring of the actual edge-cloud experienced latency [6][7][8][9]. INT relies on extra packet headers used to carry metadata information retrieved from the forwarding plane.…”