DATA PLANE WITH HEAVY HITTER DETECTOR

摘要

Some embodiments of the invention provide a data-plane forwarding circuit (data plane) that can be configured to identify large data message flows that it processes for forwarding in a network. In this document, large data message flows are referred to as heavy hitter flows. To perform its forwarding operations, the data plane includes several data message processing stages that are configured to process the data tuples associated with the data messages received by the data plane. In some embodiments, parts of the data plane message-processing stages are also configured to implement a heavy hitter detection (HHD) circuit. The operations of the data plane's message processing stages are configured by a control plane of the data plane's forwarding element in some embodiments.