Exploring SDN to Deploy Flexible Sampling-Based Network Monitoring

In recent years we witnessed the arrival of new trends, such as server virtualization and cloud services, an increasing number of mobile devices and online contents, leading the networking industry to deliberate about how traditional network architectures can be adapted or even deciding if a new perspective for them should be taken. SDN (Software-Defined Networking) emerged under this framing, opening a road for new developments due to the centralized logic control and view of the network, the decoupling of data and control planes, and the abstraction of the underlying network infrastructure from the applications. Although firstly oriented to packet switching, network measurements have also emerged as one promising field for SDN, as its flexibility enables programmable measurements, allowing a SDN controller to manage measurement tasks concurrently at multiple spatial and temporal scales.