FlowInfra: A fault-resilient scalable infrastructure for network-wide flow level measurement

The fine-grained flow level measurement is getting increasing demand in recent years. Though it fails to be a generic solution for its biased sampling, NetFlow is promising for its compatibility with major routers and its convenience to perform direct flow level measurement of both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic. Traditional flow level measurement systems based on NetFlow are mostly centralized and each of them independently performs traffic analysis of its local flow records without any coordination in a large-scale network, suffering from unbalancing workload and bad scalability. In this paper we present the design, implementation and evaluation of FlowInfra which is a fault-resilient scalable infrastructure for network-wide flow measurement of pure IPv6 flow records from NetFlow v9 exports. Through the assessment of its performance and flexible features, we show that FlowInfra achieved enhanced ability and robustness to perform network-wide flow level measurement and satisfied the goal for IPv6 network operation and management with better scalability.