Collaborative Research: CNS Core: Medium: FROOT: Future-Proof, Trustworthy Telemetry on Heterogeneous Networks

With the growth of the Internet and its importance in supporting the US economy, business, health, education and other services, it is critical to ensure both high performance and high availability of the networks underlying it. Increasingly, such networks include a heterogeneous set of network switches and other devices which must be monitored and controlled in a coordinated manner.

Emerging networked applications, such as cloud gaming or cloud streamed augmented reality, are expected to further stress both control systems and network monitoring by requiring real-time response to rapid changes in traffic workloads. This project aims to address the needs of future network control by enabling a network telemetry infrastructure that can provide timely, accurate, and trusted information about ongoing activities in the network

This project proposes FROOT, a future-proof, trustworthy telemetry infrastructure for networks of heterogeneous programmable devices (e.g., programmable switch, SmartNIC, CPU, and DPU). The project takes an interdisciplinary approach spanning algorithms, systems, and security to inform the design and implementation of next generation telemetry systems through the following: (1) universal sketch-based algorithmic design and implementation for current and new measurement tasks and network devices; (2) novel network-wide resource optimization for handling network dynamics; and (3) trustworthy sketch deployment into heterogeneous devices to obtain critical telemetry information.

The researchers also plan to deploy their network telemetry system at Mass Open Cloud testbed, an open public cloud project led by Boston University and other institutions in Massachusetts. The project will result in the development of open-source tools, algorithms, and prototype implementations that will reduce the time to deploy sketch-based telemetry in real-world scenarios.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.