Flexible sampling-based in-band network telemetry in programmable data plane

In-band network telemetry (INT) is an emerging network monitoring framework based on a protocol-independent packet processor (P4). Network devices can be programmed with a domain-specific language to embed switch-internal states into data packets as they traverse through networks. However, the current P4-based INT does not support a sampling; thus, INT headers should be augmented for all incoming packets, which will incur high overhead in a large-scale network. In this paper, we propose a flexible sampling-based INT (FS-INT) scheme to address the aforementioned issues. Simulation results show that FS-INT can reduce the protocol overhead in a controlled manner while providing sufficiently high accuracy.