Network monitoring and measurement are crucial in network management tofacilitate quality of service routing and performance evaluation. SoftwareDefined Networking (SDN) makes network management easier by separating thecontrol plane and data plane. Network monitoring in SDN is lightweight asoperators only need to install a monitoring module into the controller. Activemonitoring techniques usually introduce too many overheads into the network.The state-of-the-art approaches utilize sampling method, aggregation flowstatistics and passive measurement techniques to reduce overheads. However,little work in literature has focus on reducing the communication cost ofnetwork monitoring. Moreover, most of the existing approaches select thepolling switch nodes by sub-optimal local heuristics. Inspired by thevisibility and central control of SDN, we propose FlowCover, a low-costhigh-accuracy monitoring scheme to support various network management tasks. Weleverage the global view of the network topology and active flows to minimizethe communication cost by formulating the problem as a weighted set cover,which is proved to be NP-hard. Heuristics are presented to obtain the pollingscheme efficiently and handle flow changes practically. We build a simulator toevaluate the performance of FlowCover. Extensive experiment results show thatFlowCover reduces roughly 50% communication cost without loss of accuracy inmost cases.
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