Effective Route Scheme of Multicast Probing to Locate High-loss Links in OpenFlow Networks

With the prevalence of cloud computing and contents delivery networking, OpenFlow-based centrally-managed networks with flexible and dynamic traffic engineering are demanded. To maintain a high quality of service of the network, detecting and locating high-loss links is essential. Therefore, in this paper, a measurement framework is proposed to promptly locate all high-loss links with a minimized load on both data-plane and control-plane incurred by the measurement, which assumes only standard OpenFlow functions. It combines an active measurement by probing multicast packets along a designed route and a passive measurement by collecting flow-stats of the probing flow at selected switch ports in an appropriate sequential order to access switches. In particular, by designing the measurement route based on the backbone-and-branch tree (BBT) route scheme, the measurement accuracy and the measurement overhead (i.e., the number of accesses to switches until locating all high-loss links) can be balanced. The numerical simulation demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposal.