An Integrated Solution for High-efficiency In-band Network Telemetry

The advent of in-band network telemetry (INT) facilitates the dynamic and fine-grained monitoring of network conditions. Nevertheless, the current INT specification incurs a substantial measurement overhead, diminishing bandwidth utilization, and potential data fragmentation. Moreover, the rapid accumulation of telemetry reports may give rise to data lakes in the collector, resulting in computational burden and telemetry degradation. To address these two problems, we propose an integrated solution for high-efficiency in-band network telemetry, including an improved INT scheme, SF-INT, to reduce measurement overhead and the usage of SmartNIC to accelerate report processing. SF-INT employs network node registers to store the telemetry information collected at previous nodes by previous packets. When a packet arrives at one node, the node performs store-and-forward actions to determine the telemetry information stored in the current register and the telemetry information carried by the packet to the next hop. The packet carries only one node's telemetry information during a telemetry process, thus keeping a constant packet size. In contrast, the standard INT increases the packet size due to the hop-by-hop insertion of metadata. SmartNIC offloads report processing from the CPU and obtains comprehensive telemetry data by analyzing a set of telemetry reports. The testbed experiment results have demonstrated that our solution reduces measurement overhead and efficiently processes reports at nearly the line rate.