Measurements As First-class Artifacts

The emergence of programmable switches has sparked a significant amount of work on new techniques to performmore powerful measurement tasks, for instance, to obtain fine-grained traffic and network performance statistics. 

Previous work has focused on the efficiency of these measurements alone and has neglected flexibility, resulting in solutions that are hard to reuse or repurpose and that often overlap in functionality or goals. In this paper, we propose the use of a set of reusable primitive building blocks that can be composed to express measurement tasks in a concise and simple way. We describe the rationale for the design of our primitives, that we have named MAFIA (Measurements As FIrst-class Artifacts), and using several examples we illustrate how they can be combined to realize a comprehensive range of network measurement tasks.

 

Writing MAFIA code does not require expert knowledge of low-level switch architecture details. Using a prototype implementation of MAFIA, we demonstrate the applicability of our approach and show that the use of our primitives results in compiled code that is comparable in size and resource usage with manually written specialized P4 code, and can be run in current hardware.

This paper will be presented at IEEE InfoCom 2019, Paris. April 29th - May 2nd

 

About the authors :

Paolo Laffranchini is a Computer Science engineer, currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate in Distributed Computing program at the Instituto Superior Tecnico of Lisbon and the Université Catholique de Louvain. Paolo pursued his Master Degree in 2014 at the Universitá degli Studi di Brescia with a thesis on high availability mechanisms for stream processing systems, done in collaboration with the NEC Laboratories Europe in Heidelberg. Before starting his Ph.D. journey, he had a two-year work experience in Italy, employed in Vigilate Vision, an italian company operating in the fields of Security and Vehicular Traffic Control. His current research revolves around the area of Software-defined Networks, with a particular focus on network measurements. 

Luís Rodrigues graduated (1986), has a Master (1991) and a PhD (1996) in Electrical and Computer Engineering, by the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) da Universidade de Lisboa. He obtained the "Agregação" in Informatics (2003) by the Universidade de Lisboa.
He is a Professor (Professor Catedrático) at Departamento de Engenharia Informática, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa. From 1996 to July 2007 he served at the Departmento de Informática, Faculdade de Ciências (Faculty of Sciences), Universidade de Lisboa. He initiated his academic career at the Electrotechnic and Computers Engineering Department of Instituto Superior Técnico de Lisboa (IST) in 1989.
From 1986 to 1996 he was a member of the Distributed Systems and Industrial Automation Group at INESC. From 1997-2007, he was a (founding) member of the LASIGE laboratory at University of Lisbon, first as a member of the Navigators group and later as the leader of the Distributed Algorithms and Network Protocols group. He served as Director of the LASIGE in 2004-2005 and he served in the board of directors of INESC-ID Lisboa from 2010-2017. From July 2007 he is a member of the Distributed Systems Group at INESC-ID Lisboa.
His current interests include fault-tolerant distributed systems, concurrency, replicated data management, cloud computing, dynamic networks, information dissemination, and autonomic computing. He has more than 200 publications in these areas. He is co-author of two books (1, 2-3) on distributed computing. He is a member of the Ordem dos Engenheiros, ACM, and IEEE.

Marco Canini is an assitant professor of Computer Science at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Marco obtained his Ph.D. in computer science and engineering from the University of Genoa in 2009 after spending the last year as a visiting student at the University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory. He holds a laurea degree with honors in computer science and engineering from the University of Genoa. He was a postdoctoral researcher at EPFL from 2009 to 2012 and after that a senior research scientist for one year at Deutsche Telekom Innovation Labs & TU Berlin. Before joining KAUST, he was an assistant professor in the ICTEAM Institute at the Université catholique de Louvain. He also held positions at Intel Research and Google. Marco's work has been featured in the media, attributing Marco the title of "SDN rock star".
During the course of his Ph.D., he worked on methods for accurate Internet traffic classification in real time based on application identification and the design of scalable network monitoring applications. At EPFL, his work addressed the challenges for reducing the Internet's power consumption and for improving the reliability of distributed systems and software-defined networks.

 Balachander Krishnamurthy has been with AT&T Labs–Research since his PhD. His main focus of research of late is in the areas of Internet privacy, Online Social Networks, and Internet measurements. He has authored and edited ten books, published over 80 technical papers, holds twenty patents, and has given invited talks in over thirty countries. His most recent book “Internet Measurements: Infrastructure, Traffic and Applications” (525pp, John Wiley & Sons, co-authored with Mark Crovella), was published in July 2006 and is the first book focusing on Internet Measurement. His previous book ‘Web Protocols and Practice: HTTP/1.1, Networking Protocols, Caching, and Traffic Measurement’ (672 pp, Addison-Wesley, co-authored with Jennifer Rexford) is the first in-depth book on the technology underlying the Web, and has been translated into Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, and Chinese. His recent papers can be found at http://www.research.att.com/~bala/papers

Published on March 26, 2019