A Low-overhead Network Monitoring for SDN-Based Edge Computing

Using Software-Defined Networking (SDN) in edge computing environments allows for more flexible flow monitoring than traditional networking methods. In SDN, the controller collects statistics from all switches and can communicate with switches to dynamically manage the entire network. However, monitoring per-flow or per-switch mechanisms to obtain the flow statistics from all of the switches may significantly increase bandwidth costs between switches and the control plane. In this paper, we propose a Bandwidth Cost First (BCF) algorithm to reduce the number of monitored switches and therefore lower the monitoring cost. The experiment results show that our algorithm outperforms the existing technique by reducing the number of monitored switches by 56%, leading to a reduction in bandwidth overhead of 41% and switch processing delay by 25%.