Title
ActiveKeeper: An Accurate and Efficient Algorithm for Finding Top-k Elephant Flows
Abstract
Finding top- <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$k$ </tex-math></inline-formula> elephant flows in high-speed network is a crucial task for network traffic measurement. Since modern routers do not hold enough on-chip memory to precisely track all flow sizes, identifying elephant flows becomes more challenging than ever. Existing solutions mostly use compact data structures to fit in limited on-chip memory. However, they have to use large-size counters, <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">i.e.</i> , 20-bit counter, to prevent overflows when recording flow sizes. This wastes significant on-chip memory since flow size distribution is highly skewed. Most counters only require 8 bits to track mouse flows rather than 20 bits. In this letter, we propose ActiveKeeper, an efficient top- <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$k$ </tex-math></inline-formula> finding solution that uses two-mode active counter to record flow sizes, reducing memory usage while ensuring high accuracy. We also introduce dynamically exponential decay to increase the precision in expelling the small flows while holding the large ones. Experimental results based on real-world Internet traces show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art by achieving high accuracy and higher precision with small on-chip memory usage.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1109/LCOMM.2021.3077902
IEEE Communications Letters
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Network traffic measurement,top-k finding,elephant flow
Journal
25
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
8
1089-7798
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.35
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Mengkun Wu110.35
He Huang282965.14
Yu-e Sun3337.07
Yang Du4146.47
Shigang Chen52568187.11
Guoju Gao6366.25