CAREER: A Programmable Measurement Architecture for Network Operations

职业生涯：用于网络运营的可编程测量架构

• 批准号: 1453662
• 负责人: Minlan Yu
• 金额: $ 50万
• 依托单位: University of Southern California
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-07-01 至 2017-01-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1453662&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Programmable; Measurement; Architecture; Network

Many companies (e.g., Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon) put huge capital investments into building larger data center networks with higher link speeds. It becomes increasingly important to carefully manage such large data center networks to support multiple tenants, meet service level agreements of applications, and reduce operation cost. Most network management tasks, such as traffic accounting, traffic engineering, load balancing, and performance diagnosis, rely on accurate and timely measurement of time-varying traffic across the entire network. Unfortunately, there are three key problems in today's measurement support: (1) Network device vendors often treat measurement as a second-class citizen, devoting most of the resources to meet the networking control functions (forwarding, firewalls, load balancing, etc.), leaving limited resources for supporting measurement. (2) Operators have limited control over what (not) to measure and when to measure. As a result, the already limited measurement resources are sometimes wasted to measure flows that operators do not care, leaving even fewer resources for measuring important flows. (3) These solutions are device oriented instead of network wide. Operators have to dive into the limited measurement support at multiple devices, taking great efforts to understand these measurement results offline, and find it challenging to answer their network-wide queries.This project aims to design and build a programmable measurement architecture MAP, which transforms today's network measurement practice in enterprise and data center networks. Inspired by software-defined networking, MAP allows operators to flexibly program their network-wide measurement queries in a controller. To answer these queries, MAP automatically configures and coordinates new measurement primitives at different places across the network stack. MAP also allows operators to dynamically change their queries and automatically reconfigure the primitives accordingly to handle network dynamics.There are three key research directions: First, the project will bring novel measurement algorithms and designs throughout the network stack (VMs, hypervisors, switches, and packet sniffers). The researcher will redesign the measurement primitives at these devices to make them both generic in supporting diverse measurement requirements, and efficient in packet processing performance with limited resources and capabilities. Second, the researcher will design new declarative measurement abstractions for operators to clearly express what to measure at the network level and their accuracy/timeliness requirements. The researcher will also design and implement a runtime system that automatically matches the measurement abstractions with primitives at devices, dynamically allocates resources across tasks and handles network dynamics such as mobile hosts and routing changes. Finally, the researcher will study how to support several important and novel measurement tasks with MAP?s primitives, abstractions, and runtime, and evaluate them on MAP. The proposed research, if successful, will fundamentally change network measurement and management practice in enterprise and data centers, and lead to new designs of network devices. The research will facilitate inter-discipline research between theory, programming languages, and networking. The project also has a significant education component, including the design and innovations of graduate courses and course material on software-defined networking and computer networking, as well as research experiences for undergraduate students and members of under-represented groups.

许多公司（例如Google，Microsoft，Facebook，Amazon）将大量的资本投资投入了建立具有更高链路速度的较大数据中心网络。仔细管理如此大的数据中心网络以支持多个租户，满足应用程序的服务水平并降低运营成本变得越来越重要。大多数网络管理任务，例如流量会计，流量工程，负载平衡和性能诊断，都依赖于整个网络中随时间变化的流量的准确和及时测量。不幸的是，当今的测量支持中有三个关键问题：（1）网络设备供应商通常将测量值视为二等公民，将大部分资源投入到满足网络控制功能（转发，防火墙，负载平衡等），为支持测量的资源有限。 （2）操作员对要测量和何时测量的（无）控制有限。结果，已经有限的测量资源有时会浪费来测量操作员不在乎的流动，从而减少了测量重要流量的资源。 （3）这些解决方案是面向设备的，而不是网络宽。操作员必须在多个设备上深入研究有限的测量支持，以付出巨大的努力来离线了解这些测量结果，并发现回答其网络范围的查询是挑战。该项目旨在设计和构建可编程的测量架构图，这会在企业和数据中心网络中改变当今的网络测量实践。受软件定义网络的启发，MAP允许操作员在控制器中灵活地对其网络范围的测量查询进行编程。要回答这些查询，请在网络堆栈的不同位置自动配置并协调新的测量原始图。 MAP还允许操作员动态更改其查询，并自动重新配置原始词以处理网络动态。有三个关键的研究方向：首先，该项目将带来新的测量算法和设计，整个网络堆栈（VMS，VMS，Hypervisors，Hypervisors，Switch和Packet sniffers）。研究人员将重新设计这些设备上的测量原语，以使其既通用多样化的测量要求，又可以在数据包处理性能方面具有有限的资源和能力。其次，研究人员将设计新的声明性测量抽象，以清楚地表达在网络级别上测量的内容及其准确性/及时性要求。研究人员还将设计和实施一个运行时系统，该系统会自动与设备的原始图相匹配的测量抽象，并在任务和处理网络动态（例如移动主机）和路由更改等网络动态上动态分配资源。最后，研究人员将研究如何使用地图，抽象和运行时支持几项重要和新颖的测量任务，并在地图上对其进行评估。拟议的研究（如果成功）将从根本上改变企业和数据中心的网络测量和管理实践，并导致网络设备的新设计。该研究将促进理论，编程语言和网络之间的学分研究。该项目还具有重要的教育部分，包括研究生课程的设计和创新以及有关软件定义的网络和计算机网络的课程材料，以及本科生和代表性不足小组成员的研究经验。