2016hotsdn - Counters get off my ASIC.pdfVIP

Hey, You Darned Counters! Get Off My ASIC! Jeffrey C. Mogul Paul Congdon HP Labs HP Labs/UC Davis Palo Alto, CA Palo Alto, CA Jeff.Mogul@ Paul.Congdon@ ABSTRACT tively to events on the timescales of individual flows. For exam- Software-Defined Networking (SDN) gains much of its value ple, Hedera [1] identifies and re-routes long-lived “elephant” flows, through the use of central controllers with global views of dynamic which are too rare to be load-balanced by ECMP. network state. To support a global view, SDN protocols, such as For an SDN controller to obtain its dynamic view of network OpenFlow, expose several counters for each flow-table rule. These state, switches must maintain per-flow counters (flows can be TCP connections, or coarser-grained aggregates). Switches make these counters must be maintained by the data plane, which is typically 1 implemented in hardware as an ASIC. ASIC-based counters are in- counters visible to the controller. For example, OpenFlow pro- flexible, and cannot easily be modified to compute novel metrics. vides three counters per flow-table entry (Received Packets, Re- These counters do not need to be on the ASIC. If the ASIC data ceived Bytes, and Duration) and provides severa