A software defined sketch system for traffic monitoring

Sketch-based data streaming algorithms are used in many network monitoring applications. The sketch data structure is capable of summarizing high-speed network traffic in real-time and producing accurate estimation result of a specific traffic measurement task. However, due to the fixed hardware implementation of the sketch counter array, the flexibility of adopting the same data structure for various traffic measurement applications is limited. In this work, we propose a scheme for the sketch-based monitoring applications to define the flow keys for updating the sketch data structure in more general settings. The system prototype is implemented on the NetFPGA-10G platform.