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: 1834263
• 负责人: Minlan Yu
• 金额: $ 46.41万
• 依托单位: Harvard University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2017
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2017-10-01 至 2022-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1834263&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，谷歌、微软、Facebook、亚马逊）投入了大量资本投资来构建具有更高链接速度的更大数据中心网络。因此，如何对大型数据中心网络进行合理的管理，以支持多租户、满足应用服务水平协议、降低运营成本变得越来越重要。大多数网络管理任务，如流量计费、流量工程、负载平衡和性能诊断，都依赖于对整个网络中随时间变化的流量进行准确、及时的测量。遗憾的是，如今的测量支持存在三个关键问题：（1）网络设备厂商往往把测量当成二等公民，把大部分资源投入到满足联网控制功能（转发、防火墙、负载均衡等）上留下有限的资源用于支持测量。(2)操作员对测量什么（不测量）和何时测量的控制有限。结果，已经有限的测量资源有时被浪费在测量运营商不关心的流上，留下甚至更少的资源用于测量重要流。(3)这些解决方案是面向设备的，而不是网络范围的。运营商必须深入到有限的测量支持在多个设备，采取了很大的努力，以了解这些测量结果离线，并发现它具有挑战性，以回答他们的网络范围内的查询。本项目旨在设计和构建一个可编程的测量架构MAP，它改变了今天的网络测量实践中的企业和数据中心网络。受软件定义网络的启发，MAP允许操作员在控制器中灵活地编程其网络范围的测量查询。为了回答这些问题，MAP自动配置和协调网络堆栈中不同位置的新测量原语。MAP还允许运营商动态更改查询，并自动重新配置原语，以应对网络动态。主要研究方向有三个：第一，该项目将在整个网络堆栈（VM，hypervisor，switch和packet sniffer）中带来新颖的测量算法和设计。研究人员将重新设计这些设备上的测量原语，使它们既能通用地支持不同的测量要求，又能在有限的资源和能力下有效地提高数据包处理性能。其次，研究人员将设计新的声明性测量抽象的运营商，清楚地表达什么测量在网络层面和他们的准确性/及时性要求。研究人员还将设计和实现一个运行时系统，自动匹配的测量抽象与设备上的原语，动态分配资源的任务和处理网络动态，如移动的主机和路由的变化。最后，研究者将研究如何支持几个重要的和新的测量任务与地图？的原语、抽象和运行时，并在MAP上对它们进行评估。这项研究如果成功，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跨学科研究。该项目还有一个重要的教育组成部分，包括软件定义网络和计算机网络的研究生课程和课程材料的设计和创新，以及本科生和代表性不足群体成员的研究经验。