Quantized In-band Network Telemetry for Low Bandwidth Overhead Monitoring

Given the importance of robustness and resilience in emerging cloud-native networks, effective monitoring for fault detection is paramount and In-band network telemetry (INT) is a key candidate that enables real-time and fine-grained network monitoring with a programmable data plane. However, INT increases bandwidth overhead because network information is inserted directly into the packet header. In this paper, we propose a quantized INT (QINT) to effectively reduce overhead by considering the distribution of raw data. In QINT, the programmable switch encodes a raw telemetry item into a quantized bit stream using the Huffman coding scheme. To do this, QINT monitors the distribution of network telemetry items and encodes high-frequency data that are generated most of the time in a few bits. We implemented QINT on a programmable switch and our experimental results demonstrate that QINT can reduce the relative bandwidth usage by up to 60.6% compared to traditional INT, respectively.