NT-RP: A High-Versatility Approach for Network Telemetry Based on FPGA Dynamic Reconfigurable Pipeline

Abstract

Network telemetry provides more accurate and reliable services for intelligent network control by pushing fresh status information actively with help of data plane. However, most existing network telemetry methods are difficult to be deployed effectively in business environment due to the lack of runtime reconfigurability, huge time-space overhead, and high probability of information loss. In this work, we propose a high-versatility approach for network telemetry based on FPGA dynamic reconfigurable pipeline called NT-RP to maintain the balance between the accuracy of the measurement and the overhead in different scenarios. NT-RP can change the processing logic in runtime to obtain different network measurement spontaneously desired by users. Benefiting from distributed cyclic storage strategy and telemetry function integration mechanism, NT-RP can greatly reduce the overhead during measurement and mitigate the telemetry information missing problem caused by packet loss. The implementation of NT-RP in FPGA is evaluated in a real network testbed which consists of a few programmable nodes. Experimental results show that the influence of NT-RP in large traffic scenarios is less than 1%. It is not only able to successfully change the telemetry task during operation, but also perform more accurate network measurements with little telemetry information occupancy.