Coordinated sampling sans origin-destination identifiers: Algorithms and analysis

Flow monitoring is used for a wide range of network management applications. Many such applications require that the monitoring infrastructure provide high flow coverage and support fine-grained network-wide objectives. Coordinated Sampling (cSamp) is a recent proposal that improves the monitoring capabilities of ISPs to address these demands. In this paper, we address a key deployment impediment for cSamp-like solutions-the need for routers to determine the Origin-Destination (OD) pair of each packet. In practice, however, this information is not available without expensive changes. We present a new framework called cSamp-T, in which each router uses only local information, instead of the OD-pair identifiers. Leveraging results from the theory of maximizing submodular set functions, cSamp-T provides near-ideal performance in maximizing the total flow coverage in the network. Further, with a small amount of targeted upgrades to a few routers, cSamp-T nearly optimally maximizes the minimum fractional coverage across all OD-pairs. We demonstrate these results on a range of real topologies.