Long-term network packet traces (e.g., pcaps), if available, can enable and inform lots of management tasks. However, storing packet data at scale is very expensive, forcing operators to choose between coarse historical summaries or short retention windows. In this context, deep generative compression (DGC) offers a new hope to store compact model parameters and regenerate structurally accurate traces on demand. We evaluate the suitability of recent deep generative approaches [21, 24] for packet trace modeling and generation. We find that their fidelity metrics are disconnected from the domain-specific queries/use cases, and they have bad cost-fidelity trade-off. We propose DeePCAP, an end-to-end trace storage system to close this gap. DeePCAP introduces a query-driven fidelity framework spanning packet- and flow-level queries to tackle the fidelity disconnection, and proposes a novel dimensionality reduction approach using frequency domain encoding to improve cost-fidelity trade-off. Our preliminary results show that DeePCAP achieves the best fidelity on the 100+ query suite and the strongest cost-fidelity trade-off.

Network telemetry has seen an increasing trend of deploying approximate measurement algorithms (e.g., sketches) on programmable switches due to their ability to provide line-rate speed, high measurement accuracy, and low memory cost.Heap, a vital component of many of measurement algorithms, hinders their deployment because of the difficulties in incorporating it into pipelines.In this paper, we introduce PipHeap, a pipeline-friendly, binary-tree-based min heap that can enhance existing sketches without introducing additional errors.Through evaluation with real-world datasets, we demonstrate that PipHeap can reduce the error of these integrated algorithms by 33% to 97% (78% on average) under the same memory allocation.We have successfully implemented PipHeap and its combination with six different sketches in our testbed, and successfully extended other approximate algorithms (e.g.Space-Saving) onto programmable switch platforms.We have made all code associated available as open-source.

Sketches have risen as promising solutions for frequency estimation, which is one of the most fundamental tasks in approximate data stream processing. In many scenarios, users have a strong demand to apply sketches under the expected error constraints. In this paper, we explore how to configure sketch parameters to satisfy user-defined error constraints. We propose SketchConf, an automatic sketch configuration framework, which efficiently generates memory-optimal configurations for the first time. We show that SketchConf can be applied to order-independent sketches, including CM, Count, Tower, and Nitro sketches. We further discuss how to deal with the unknown and changeable workloads when applying SketchConf to the real scenarios of streaming data processing. Experimental results show that SketchConf can be up to 715.51 times faster than the baseline algorithm, and the outputted configurations save up to 99.99% memory and achieve up to 27.44 times throughput, compared with the theory-based configurations. The code is open sourced at Github.

The data plane cache, a critical functionality found in numerous network devices, such as programmable switches, intelligent NICs, and DPUs, is often subject to limitations in its programmability and memory access capacity. As a result, the majority of existing data plane caches rely on simple and inefficient replacement policies. This paper is set to introduce LRU, a near-optimal replacement policy, into the programmable data plane. We first explore the reasons why the traditional implementation of LRU is not suitable for deployment on the data plane. Consequently, we propose P4LRU, a pipeline-optimized version of the LRU implementation. Building on P4LRU, we conceive three distinct in-network systems - LruTable, LruIndex, and LruMon, and successfully bring them to life on Tofino switches. Our thorough experimental trials establish that P4LRU provides a significant performance boost over existing data plane caches in these three systems. We have open-sourced the source codes for the three systems on GitHub [1].