OmniWindow: A General and Efficient Window Mechanism Framework for Network Telemetry

Recent network telemetry solutions typically target programmable switches to achieve high performance and in-network visibility. They partition the packet stream into windows and then apply various stream processing techniques to summarize flow-level statistics. However, existing studies focus on the measurement within each window. Window management is still a missing piece due to the resource limitation of programmable switches. In this paper, we propose OmniWindow, a general and efficient window mechanism framework. OmniWindow splits the original window into fine-grained sub-windows such that the sub-windows can be merged into various window types. To deal with the resource restriction, OmniWindow carefully designs its data plane memory layout and proposes a window synchronization method. It also employs a collaborative architecture that can collect and reset stateful data in sub-windows within a limited time. We prototype OmniWindow on Tofino. We incorporate OmniWindow into a SOTA query-driven telemetry system and eight sketch-based telemetry algorithms. Our experiments demonstrate that OmniWindow enables these telemetry solutions to achieve higher accuracy than conventional window mechanism.