iTeleScope: Softwarized Network Middle-Box for Real-Time Video Telemetry and Classification

Video continues to dominate network traffic, yet operators today have poor visibility into the number, duration, and resolutions of the video streams traversing their domain. Current monitoring approaches are inaccurate, expensive, or unscalable, as they rely on statistical sampling, middle-box hardware, or packet inspection software. We present iTelescope, the first intelligent, inexpensive, and scalable softwarized network middle-box solution for identifying and classifying video flows in realtime. Our solution is novel in combining dynamic flow rules with telemetry and machine learning, and is built on commodity OpenFlow switches and open-source software. We develop a fully functional system, train it in the lab using multiple machine learning algorithms, and validate its performance to show over 95% accuracy in identifying and classifying video streams from many providers, including YouTube and Netflix. Lastly, we conduct tests to demonstrate its scalability to tens of thousands of concurrent streams, and deploy it live on a campus network serving several hundred real users. Our traffic monitoring system gives unprecedented fine-grained real-time visibility of video streaming performance to operators of enterprise and carrier networks at very low cost.