A survey of sketches in traffic measurement: Design, Optimization, Application and Implementation

Network measurement probes the underlying network to support upper-level decisions such as network management, network update, network maintenance, network defense and beyond. Due to the massive, speedy, unpredictable features of network flows, sketches are widely implemented in measurement nodes to approximately record the frequency or estimate the cardinality of flows. At their cores, sketches usually maintain one or multiple counter array(s), and rely on hash functions to select the counter(s) for each flow. Then the space-efficient sketches from the distributed measurement nodes are aggregated to provide statistics of the undergoing flows. Currently, tremendous redesigns and optimizations have been proposed to improve the sketches for better network measurement performance. However, existing reviews or surveys mainly focus on one particular aspect of measurement tasks. Researchers and engineers in the network measurement community desire an all-in-one survey that covers the entire processing pipeline of sketch-based network measurement. To this end, we present the first comprehensive survey of this area. We first introduce the preparation of flows for measurement, then detail the most recent investigations of design, aggregation, decoding, application and implementation of sketches for network measurement. To summarize the existing efforts, we carry out an in-depth study of the existing literature, covering more than 90 sketch designs and optimization strategies. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive analysis and qualitative/quantitative comparison of the sketch designs. Finally,we highlight the open issues for future sketch-based network measurement research.