EPLE: An Efficient Passive Lightweight Estimator for SDN packet loss measurement

As Software Defined Networks (SDN) deployments are reaching mainstream, network performance becomes a key concern for success. Service Providers (SPs) rely on network management capabilities, such as packet loss monitoring, to observe the network status and thereby facilitate service-level agreements. On one hand, SPs seek tools providing greater visibility into the status of their networks, but on the other hand, they are keen to limit the overhead of management capabilities in their operational networks. To meet these conflicting requirements, Efficient Passive Lightweight Estimator (EPLE) takes advantage of existing network traffic and SDN signaling, without the need of extra monitoring traffic or facilities. EPLE does not introduce any data plane overhead and the signaling overhead is reduced by locally creating microflow descriptors out of aggregated flow definitions. Our proof-of-concept prototype shows that EPLE can estimate packet loss rates accurately while keeping the processing and signaling overheads small compared to existing active measurement methods.