INTView: Adaptive Planner for In-Band Network Telemetry without Detours

Network visualization is essential for network operators to diagnose ongoing network failures and understand the quality of the network. In-Band Network Telemetry (INT) supports network visualization by inserting P4 switch state information (e.g., queue length, hop latency, and link utilization) into the specific INT packets. In order to achieve network-wide coverage, paths of INT packets need to be delicately designed to ensure non-overlapping, high performance, and low overhead. However, existing INT path planning solutions ignore capturing the dynamic network status and fail to obtain the optimum. In this paper, we model the INT path planning based on the directed Edge Cover problem upon the dynamic network status, with the objective of minimizing the INT path latency. Although it is actually a non-linear integer program problem, by adopting delicate transformations, we design approximation algorithms with performance guarantees. We implement our system prototype INTView based on INTCollector upon real devices, i.e., Barefoot Wedge100BF and Inspur Rack. Extensive evaluation upon realistic settings shows that our proposed algorithm achieves 2x performance improvement regarding the completion time, compared with state-of-the-art schemas.