Monitoring Flow Aggregates With Controllable Accuracy

In this paper, the authors show the feasibility of real-time flow monitoring with controllable accuracy in today's IP networks. Their approach is based on Netflow and A-GAP. A-GAP is a protocol for continuous monitoring of network state variables, which are computed from device metrics using aggregation functions, such as SUM, AVERAGE and MAX. A-GAP is designed to achieve a given monitoring accuracy with minimal overhead. AGAP is decentralized and asynchronous to achieve robustness and scalability. The protocol incrementally computes aggregation functions inside the network and, based on a stochastic model, it dynamically configures local filters that control the overhead and accuracy.