Constant time weighted frequency estimation for virtual network functionalities

Monitoring flow volumes is a fundamental capability in network measurement. Sampling is often used to cope with the line speed and the applied methods typically rely on uniform packet sampling. However, it is inaccurate when there is a large variance in packet sizes. In this work we introduce Byte Uniform Sampling (BUS), a sampling method for estimating flow volumes. We show that BUS can be combined with existing unweighted estimation algorithms and that the result is a weighted algorithm. BUS enables an asymptotic update time improvement as existing weighted algorithms are slower. We formally analyze BUS and evaluate it on five Internet traces. Finally, we extend the DPDK version of Open vSwitch to support BUS and demonstrate similar throughput when compared to uniform packet samples.