Sketch for traffic measurement: design, optimization, application and implementation

Network measurement probes the underlying network to support upper-level decisions such as network management, network update, network maintenance, network defense and beyond. Due to the massive, speedy, unpredictable features of network flows, sketches are widely implemented in measurement nodes to record the frequency or estimate the cardinality of flows approximately. At their cores, sketches usually maintain one or multiple counter array(s), and relies on hash functions to select the counter(s) for each flow. Then the space-efficient sketches from the distributed measurement nodes are aggregated to provide statistics of the undergoing flows. Currently, tremendous redesigns and optimizations have been proposed to further improve the sketches for better network measurement performance. However, the existing reviews or surveys mainly focus on one particular aspect of measurement tasks. Researchers and engineers in the network measurement community desire an all-in-one survey which covers the whole processing pipeline of sketch-based network measurement. To this end, we present the first comprehensive survey in this area. We first introduce the preparation of flows for measurement, then detail the most recent investigations of design, aggregation, decoding, application and implementation of sketches for network measurement. To summary the existing efforts, we conduct an in-depth study of the existing literature, covering more than 80 sketch designs and optimization strategies. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive analysis and qualitative/quantitative comparison of the sketch designs. Finally, we highlight the open issues for future sketch-based network measurement research.