SFCMon: an Efficient and Scalable Monitoring System for Network Flows in SFC-enabled Domains

A comprehensive monitoring system is essential to assist solutions for most of SFC problems. Therefore, in this work, we propose SFCMon, an efficient and scalable monitoring solution to keep track network flows in SFC environments. To achieve the desired goals, SFCMon works with a pipeline of probabilistic data structures to detect and store large flows as well as perflow counters. For evaluation purposes, based on the SFC reference architecture defined by RFC 7665, we implement a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) framework, which provides a P4-based SFC switch and Python-based SFC Controller. Presented initial experiments demonstrate that SFCMon introduces a negligible performance penalty while providing significant scalability gains.