Hardware/Software Co-Design for High-Performance Monitoring

In high-volume network environments, the sheer packet load will often by far exceed what monitoring software running on commodity hardware can handle. We strive to solve this problem by extending networking hardware with new primitives which can be used by network monitoring software. We will create a feedback protocol allowing network hardware to signal information about the network state back to the monitoring system. Furthermore, we will create several mechanisms using this protocol, e.g., to push connection tracking and L4 protocol parsing into the SDN. We will explore the implementation of these primitives and signaling mechanisms on programmable network components built on Netronome Agilio ISAs.