Lightweight INT on the Tofino programmable switch

In-band network telemetry (INT), enabled by programmable data planes and the appearance of programming protocol-independent languages such as P4, emerged as a viable approach for network monitoring. INT allows the collection of fine-grained network information in real-time, increasing network visibility, at the cost of network overhead. Several lightweight INT approaches have been recently proposed that attempt to alleviate the transmission overhead of INT, while maintaining a high degree of monitoring accuracy. However, their impact on the resources of the respective hardware network devices has been hardly investigated as most of the approaches are evaluated via simulation. In this study, we provide proof of concept implementations of two lightweight INT approaches that have been proposed for path tracing on the Intel Tofino ASIC, identifying the challenges of porting the solution to the selected target. We examine their performance, providing an in-depth analysis of resource consumption.