Effective Route Scheme of Multicast Probing to Locate High-loss Links in OpenFlow Networks

Abstract

The prevalence of cloud computing and contents delivery networking has led to demand for OpenFlow-based centrally-managed networks with dynamic and flexible traffic engineering. Maintaining a high level of network service quality requires detecting and locating high-loss links. Therefore, in this paper, a measurement framework is proposed to promptly locate all high-loss links with a minimized load on both data-plane and control-plane incurred by the measurement, which assumes only standard OpenFlow functions. It combines an active measurement by probing multicast packets along a designed route and a passive measurement by collecting flow-stats of the probing flow at selected switch ports in an appropriate sequential order to access switches. In particular, by designing the measurement route based on the backbone-and-branch tree (BBT) route scheme, the measurement accuracy and the measurement overhead (the number of accesses to switches until locating all high-loss links) can be balanced. The numerical simulation demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposal.