SCMon: Leveraging Segment Routing to Improve Network Monitoring
(2016) INFOCOM — Location: San Francisco, California, US (10.April.2016)
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- Abstract
- To guarantee correct operation of their networks, operators have to promptly detect and diagnose data-plane issues, like broken interface cards or link failures. Networks are becoming more complex, with a growing number of Equal Cost MultiPath (ECMP) and link bundles. Hence, some data-plane problems (e.g. silent packet dropping at one router) can hardly be detected with control-plane protocols or simple monitoring tools like ping or traceroute. In this paper, we propose a new technique, called SCMon, that enables continuous monitoring of the data-plane, in order to track the health of all routers and links. SCMon leverages the recently proposed Segment Routing (SR) architecture to monitor the entire network with a single box (and no additional monitoring protocol). In particular, SCMon uses SR to (i) force monitoring probes to travel over cycles; and (ii) test parallel links and bundles at a per-link granularity. We present original algorithms to compute cycles that cover all network links with a limited number of SR segments. Further, we prototype and evaluate SCMon both with simulations and Linux-based emulations. Our experiments show that SCMon quickly detects and precisely pinpoints data-plane problems, with a limited overhead.
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Citations
Aubry, F., Lebrun, D., Vissicchio, S., Khong, M. T., Deville, Y., & Bonaventure, O. (2016). SCMon: Leveraging Segment Routing to Improve Network Monitoring. INFOCOM 2016. Published. INFOCOM, San Francisco, California, US. https://doi.org/10.1109/INFOCOM.2016.7524410