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PSketch: A Priority-Aware Sketch Architecture for Real-Time Flow Monitoring via eBPF

Emerging Technologies 2025-09-10 v1

Abstract

Sketch-based monitoring in SDN often suffers from tightly coupled pipeline and memory constraints, limiting algorithmic flexibility and reducing accuracy. We propose PSketch, the first in-kernel priority-aware sketching framework implemented with eBPF. It ensures lossless tracking of high-priority flows via a hash-based table and approximates top-k elephant flows using a sketch pipe. PSketch supports both TCP and UDP and enables in-kernel retransmission tracking with minimal overhead. Unlike SDN-based approaches, it runs on commodity Linux systems, removing hardware dependencies. We perform evaluation on 10 Gbps CAIDA traces. Results show that PSketch achieves 96.0% top-k detection accuracy, 96.4% retransmission recall, and only 0.7% throughput degradation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.07338,
  title  = {PSketch: A Priority-Aware Sketch Architecture for Real-Time Flow Monitoring via eBPF},
  author = {Yuanjun Dai and Qingzhe Guo and Xiangren Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.07338},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

6 pages, 1 figure, under review