Distributed Measurement-Aware Routing for Flow Utility in Routing Assisted Traffic Monitoring

Network-wide traffic measurement is important for various network management tasks, ranging from traffic accounting, traffic engineering, and network troubleshooting to security. The network operators are interested in monitoring passing traffic in a network for reasons of traffic accounting, debugging or troubleshooting, forensics, and traffic engineering. Previous research has focused on monitor placement across the network for maximizing the monitoring utility. But, traffic characteristics and measurement objectives can change dynamically, rendering a placement of monitors suboptimal. It will not be the feasible solution to dynamically reconfigure measurement infrastructure. The problem is addressed by strategically routing traffic subpopulations over fixed monitors. This approach is referred as MeasuRouting. The challenge of MeasuRouting to work within the intradomain TE operations that are geared for utilizing bandwidth resources and meeting quality-ofservice (QoS). A feature of intradomain routing, is specified for aggregate flows which is feasible for measurouting. MeasuRouting can route the components of an total flow while ensuring that the placement of monitor is compliant to original TE objectives. In this paper, a theoretical framework for MeasuRouting and flow utility function for packet is presented.