Faster and More Accurate Measurement through Additive-Error Counters

Abstract: Counters are a fundamental building block for networking applications such as load balancing, traffic engineering, and intrusion detection, which require estimating flow sizes and identifying heavy hitter flows. Existing works suggest replacing counters with shorter multiplicative error \emph{estimators} that improve the accuracy by fitting more of them within a given space. However, such estimators impose a computational overhead that degrades the measurement throughput. Instead, we propose \emph{additive} error estimators, which are simpler, faster, and more accurate when used for network measurement. Our solution is rigorously analyzed and empirically evaluated against several other measurement algorithms on real Internet traces. For a given error target, we improve the speed of the uncompressed solutions by $5\times$-$30\times$, and the space by up to $4\times$. Compared with existing state-of-the-art estimators, our solution is $ 9\times$-$35\times$ faster while being considerably more accurate.