Application aware elephant flow identification

摘要

A network device identifies elephant flows. The network device filters received network data according to an application-specific criteria and identifies the elephant flow from the filtered network data. To do so, the network device can employ a multi-stage filtering process to identify an elephant flow in the received network data. The network device separates the filtered network data into multiple macroflows using a first hash function, and identifies the macroflow with the highest rate. Then, the network device disaggregates the high rate macroflow into multiple microflows using a second hash function and identifies the highest rate microflow as the elephant flow. The network device maintains an elephant flow cache with entries for currently identified elephant flows. The network device may also take management actions on the elephant flows, and the management actions may be application specific.

主权项

1. A method comprising:
in a network device:
obtaining an application identification criterion for a specific application;receiving network flow data in the network device;applying the application identification criterion to the network flow data to identify application specific network flow data arising from the specific application; andperforming a jumbo flow analysis on the application specific network flow data to determine whether a jumbo network flow is present for that particular application, the jumbo flow analysis comprising:
identifying a specific macroflow in the application specific network flow data, the specific macroflow comprising multiple component dataflows;disaggregating the specific macroflow into the multiple component dataflows; andidentifying, as the jumbo network flow, a specific dataflow among the multiple component dataflows that meets a jumbo network flow identification criterion.