Single Update Sketch with Variable Counter Structure

Per-flow size measurement is key to many streaming applications and management systems, particularly in high-speed networks. Performing such measurement on the data plane of a network device at the line rate requires on-chip memory and computing resources that are shared by other key network functions. It leads to the need for very compact and fast data structures, called sketches, which trade off space for accuracy. Such a need also arises in other application context for extremely large data sets. The goal of sketch design is two-fold: to measure flow size as accurately as possible and to do so as efficiently as possible (for low overhead and thus high processing throughput). The existing sketches can be broadly categorized to multi-update sketches and single update sketches. The former are more accurate but carry larger overhead. The latter incur small overhead but their accuracy is poor. This paper proposes a Single update Sketch with a Variable counter Structure (SSVS), a new sketch design which is several times faster than the existing multi-update sketches with comparable accuracy, and is several times more accurate than the existing single update sketches with comparable overhead. The new sketch design embodies several technical contributions that integrate the enabling properties from both multi-update sketches and single update sketches in a novel structure that effectively controls the measurement error with minimum processing overhead.