LossRadar: Fast Detection of Lost Packets in Data Center Networks

Packet losses are common in data center networks, may be caused by a variety of reasons (e.g., congestion, blackhole), and have significant impacts on application performance and network operations. Thus, it is important to provide fast detection of packet losses independent of their root causes. We also need to capture both the locations and packet header information of the lost packets to help diagnose and mitigate these losses. Unfortunately, existing monitoring tools that are generic in capturing all types of network events often fall short in capturing losses fast with enough details and low overhead. Due to the importance of loss in data centers, we propose a specific monitoring system designed for loss detection. We propose LossRadar, a system that can capture individual lost packets and their detailed information in the entire network on a fine time scale. Our extensive evaluation on prototypes and simulations demonstrates that LossRadar is easy to implement in hardware switches, achieves low memory and bandwidth overhead, while providing detailed information about individual lost packets. We also build a loss analysis tool that demonstrates the usefulness of LossRadar with a few example applications.