Monitoring Network Routing and Traffic with Low Space

MIT2001-09

 

Progress Report: January 1, 2002—June 30, 2002

 

Erik D. Demaine

 

 

 

Project Overview

 

This project has developed algorithms and data structures that extract essential characteristics of network traffic streams passing through routers, namely the most common destination address, subject to a limited amount of memory about previously seen packets.  Such characteristics are essential for designing accurate models and developing a general understanding of Internet traffic patterns, which are critical for such applications as efficient network routing, caching, prefetching, information delivery, and network upgrades.

                                       

As described in the previous progress report, we have designed and analyzed efficient algorithms and data structures that have provable guarantees on the quality of gathered statistics based on weak assumptions on the traffic distribution.  We have considered the range from deterministic, fully guaranteed algorithms (which are difficult but surprisingly possible) to randomized, probabilistically guaranteed algorithms (which are more powerful and achieve better bounds).  On the other hand, we proposed to prove lower bounds on the possible success of any algorithm.  This work is an ongoing collaboration with Prof. Alejandro López-Ortiz and Prof. Ian Munro of the University of Waterloo.

 

 

Progress Through June 2002

 

Since the last progress report, we have concentrated on detailing and writing our results in a paper, called “Frequency Estimation of Internet Packet Streams with Limited Space.”  This paper includes several new results in terms of algorithms, data structures, and lower bounds that are stronger than the results claimed before.  We consider the general problem in which packets are categorized according to destination address, source address, etc., and the goal is to identify the categories that occur most frequently.  The new results can be summarized as follows:

 

1)     In the worst-case omniscient-adversary model (where the network traffic distribution is completely unknown):

a)     All categories that occur more than 1/(m+1) of the time, where m is the number of counters that can be stored in memory, can (in particular) be deterministically reported after a single pass through the stream.  However, it is unknown which reported categories have this frequency.

b)     This result is best possible: if the most common category has frequency of less than 1/(m+1), then the algorithm can be forced to report only uniquely occurring elements.

2)     In the stochastic model (where the network traffic distribution is arbitrary but uniformly permuted over time):

a)     All categories that occur with relative frequency more than (c ln n)/sqrt(m n) for a constant c > 0 can be reported after a single pass through the stream, where n is the number of packets in the stream.  Thus, as the stream gets longer, the results get significantly better.

b)     The algorithm estimates the frequencies of the reported categories to within a desired error factor ε > 0 (influencing $c$).

c)     The results hold with (polynomially) high probability, meaning that the probability of failure is at most 1/nk for a desired constant k (also influencing c).

d)     This result is best possible up to constant factors: if the maximum frequency is below f/sqrt(n m), then the algorithm can be forced to report only uniquely occurring elements with probability at least (e-1+1/e)f.

3)     Both of these one-pass algorithms can be implemented by efficient data structures to use a small constant amount of worst-case time per packet.

 

This paper will be presented at the 10th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms, and will appear in the proceedings of the conference, to be published in Springer-Verlag’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.  The paper is available at http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~edemaine/papers/NetworkStats_ESA2002/.  We have also prepared a full version of the paper, which includes all details of algorithms and proofs, some of which did not fit in the conference paper above.  This version is a technical report at MIT and will be submitted soon to a journal.  It too can be downloaded from the web, at http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~edemaine/papers/NetworkStats_TR2002/.

 

We have also begun exploring sources for real-world data to test our algorithms experimentally on actual Internet traffic.  In particular, we have initiated discussions with Mary Ann Ladd, Technical Manager for the Computer Resource Services group at the MIT Lab for Computer Science.  The current proposal is to gather packet headers that pass through the router connecting the MIT Lab for Computer Science to the rest of the Internet, over the course of a day or more.  We have identified the NetFlow system as a candidate approach to collecting this packet data from Cisco routers.

                                                                                                                 

 

Research Plan for the Next Six Months

                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

As described above, our current plan is to implement the algorithms and test them on real-world data.  The first step in this regard, currently in progress, is to gather the packet-header data of actual network traffic.  Then we plan to implement the algorithms and run them in an offline manner on this data.  By comparing their estimated statistics with the perfect statistics (which we can compute exactly in this offline scenario), we will evaluate both the practical relevance of our traffic distribution assumptions, as well as how the parameters and worst-case analysis affect the performance in practice.  Our expectations are that our algorithms will handle the true traffic distribution effectively.  We will then see how much space is required to achieve low error rates, and consider the practicality of having this much space in a physical router (the online scenario).  Our expectation from our probabilistic analysis is that little space will be required.

 

We will also continue to explore the theoretical side, which offers a range of problems relating to network traffic monitoring.  In the context of finding the most frequently occurring elements, the most prominent problem is to determine to what extent randomization and an oblivious adversary can allow us to improve the bounds even for the worst case.  We are working on adapting a similar algorithm to our stochastic algorithm by randomly perturbing the sizes of the rounds.  The idea is that such perturbations prevent the adversary from knowing when the actual samples occur.  The probabilistic analysis of this variant is significantly more complicated, and it remains to be seen how good a bound can be achieved.  We are hopeful that a random perturbation strategy will lead to interesting results in this context.