Drift-bottle: a lightweight and distributed approach to failure localization in general networks

Network failure severely impairs network performance, affecting latency and throughput of data transmission. Existing failure localization solutions for general networks face problems such as difficulty in acquiring data from end hosts, need for extra infrastructure, and excessive resource consumption. Meanwhile, solutions designed for data center networks are hard to apply in general networks, as they usually rely on the topology regularity of DCNs. In this paper, we propose Drift-Bottle, a lightweight and distributed approach to failure localization in general networks. In Drift-Bottle, each switch judges the status of flows and makes a local inference for suspicious links. We design a distributed localization scheme where each normal packet is used as a "drift-bottle" that carries a "letter", i.e., a lightweight inference header, while traversing the network. Each switch along the path updates the inference header by aggregating it with its local inference. Whenever the inference is evident enough to identify the culprit links of failures, a warning is sent to the operator immediately. Drift-Bottle implements its function mainly on the data plane of programmable switches and thus reduce the overhead brought to switches significantly. Evaluation based on simulation on different topologies demonstrates that Drift-Bottle provides fast, precise and lightweight failure localization to operators of general networks.