Monitor Placement for Link Latency Measurement in Hybrid SDNs

Accurate link latency information is essential for various traffic engineering problems, such as routing design and network diagnosis. However, due to the routing constraints, link latency measurement is still a challenging problem in hybrid software-defined networks (SDNs) and little literature has been found in this field. Due to cost, a hybrid SDN composed of conventional routers and SDN switches will exist for some time to come, which shows the necessity and the urgency to address this problem. In this paper, we investigate this link latency measurement problem in two different scenarios: 1) the conventional routers can only support the shortest path routing protocol, and 2) the conventional routers can support source routing protocol. For both of these scenarios, we show how to deploy a minimum number of monitors and how to construct measurement paths between monitors to measure all the link latencies. Several algorithms are presented to solve these problems and the evaluations on different topologies prove the superiority of the proposed methods.