Network monitoring is receiving more attention than ever with the need for a self-driving network to tackle increasingly severe network management challenges. Advanced management applications rely on traffic data analyses, which require network monitoring to flexibly provide comprehensive traffic characteristics. Moreover, in virtualized environments, software network monitoring is constrained by available resources and requirements of cloud operators. In this paper, Trident, a policy-based network monitoring system at the host, is proposed. Trident is a novel monitoring approach, off-path configurable streaming, which offers remote analyzers a fine-grained holistic view of the network traffic. A novel fast path packet classification algorithm and a corresponding cached flow form are also proposed to improve monitoring efficiency. Evaluated in a practical deployment, Trident demonstrates negligible interference with forwarding and requires no additional software dependencies. Trident has been deployed in production networks of several Tier-IV datacenters.

With the proliferation of cloud services and development of fine-grained virtualization techniques, the Cloud Management System (CMS) is required to manage multiple resources efficiently for the large-scale, high-density computing units. Specifically, providing guaranteed networking Service Level Agreement (SLA) has become a challenge. This paper proposes MN-SLA (Modular Networking SLA), a framework to provide networking SLA and to enable its seamless integration with existing CMSes. Targeting at a modular, general, robust, and efficient design,MN-SLA abstracts general interacting Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) between CMS and SLA subsystem, and it is able to accomplish the integration with minor modifications to CMS. The evaluations based on large scale simulation show that the proposed networking SLA scheduling is promising in terms of resource utilization, being able to accommodate at least 1.4 $\mathrm{\times }$ the number of instances of its competitors.

Most types of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) architectures employ reactive rule dispatching to enhance real-time network control. The rule dispatcher, as one of the key components of the network controller, generates and dispatches the cache rules with response for the packet-in messages from the forwarding devices. It is important not only for ensuring semantic integrity between the control plane and the data plane, but also for preserving the performance and efficiency of the forwarding devices. In theory, generating the optimal cache rules on demands is a knotty problem due to its high theoretical complexity. In practice, however, the characteristics lying in real-life traffic and rule sets demonstrate that temporal and spacial localities can be leveraged by the rule dispatcher to significantly reduce computational overhead. In this paper, we take a deep-dive into the reactive rule dispatching problem through modeling and complexity analysis, and then we propose a set of algorithms named Hierarchy-Based Dispatching (HBD), which exploits the nesting hierarchy of rules to simplify the theoretical model of the problem, and trade the strict coverage optimality off for a more practical but still superior rule generation result. Experimental result shows that HBD achieves performance gain in terms of rule cache capability and rule storage efficiency against the existing approaches.