Near-Optimal Probing Planning for In-Band Network Telemetry

In-band Network Telemetry (INT) is gaining traction as an advanced network monitoring approach. Despite a few recent initiatives to orchestrate the collection of in-band network statistics, state-of-the-art approaches fall short when it comes to efficiently collect telemetry items while subjected to real-world constraints. In this letter, we propose Probe Planning for In-Band Network Telemetry (P2INT) to coordinate how probing packets are generated and routed to ensure that all links are covered so that the required in-band network telemetry data is collected. We theoretically formalize the problem as a Integer Linear Programming model and propose an efficient mathematical programming-based heuristic to solve it. Our results show that P2INT outperforms the closest contender by a factor of up to 6x concerning the number of probing cycles generated.