Air Sketch: A Fast and Accurate Traffic Measurement Sketch with Multi-Class Overflow

Ma, Tianxiang; Zhao, Mingwei; Li, Dan; Meng, Jinhu; Li, Wenhao; Luo, Kaiyuan; Li, Zhuo

doi:10.3390/electronics14112143

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Open AccessArticle

Air Sketch: A Fast and Accurate Traffic Measurement Sketch with Multi-Class Overflow

by

Tianxiang Ma

^1,*,†,

Mingwei Zhao

^1,†,

Dan Li

¹,

Jinhu Meng

²,

Wenhao Li

²,

Kaiyuan Luo

² and

Zhuo Li

²

¹

State Grid Hebei Electric Power Research Institute, Shijiazhuang 050021, China

²

CoopNet Co., Ltd., Taiyuan 037000, China

^*

Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

^†

These authors contributed equally to this work.

Electronics 2025, 14(11), 2143; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics14112143 (registering DOI)

Submission received: 31 March 2025 / Revised: 7 May 2025 / Accepted: 13 May 2025 / Published: 24 May 2025

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Abstract

A sketch is a probabilistic data structure that can accurately estimate massive network traffic with a small memory overhead. To improve the measurement accuracy, most sketch-based schemes separate elephant flows from mouse flows to accommodate the skewed network traffic. However, the increased algorithmic complexity often results in a sacrifice of measurement throughput. In addition, some improved sketches may be over-reliant on the skewed distribution of traffic, which results in unstable accuracy. To this end, a novel sketch, called Air Sketch, is proposed in this paper. It treats flows of different sizes as air with different temperatures. Meanwhile, a deterministic replacement strategy is applied to elephant flows. In order to improve throughput, an asymmetric insertion and query algorithm with a global hash is designed. The performance of Air Sketch is evaluated using real traffic transaction datasets, anonymized internet traces, and synthetic Zipf datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that Air Sketch can outperform the best typical measurement methods by up to 27 times in flow size measurement and up to 40 times in elephant flow detection. Additionally, Air Sketch achieves high accuracy and stability while achieving high insertion and query throughput.

Keywords: network traffic measurement; sketch; adaptability; elephant flow detection

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MDPI and ACS Style

Ma, T.; Zhao, M.; Li, D.; Meng, J.; Li, W.; Luo, K.; Li, Z. Air Sketch: A Fast and Accurate Traffic Measurement Sketch with Multi-Class Overflow. Electronics 2025, 14, 2143. https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics14112143

AMA Style

Ma T, Zhao M, Li D, Meng J, Li W, Luo K, Li Z. Air Sketch: A Fast and Accurate Traffic Measurement Sketch with Multi-Class Overflow. Electronics. 2025; 14(11):2143. https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics14112143

Chicago/Turabian Style

Ma, Tianxiang, Mingwei Zhao, Dan Li, Jinhu Meng, Wenhao Li, Kaiyuan Luo, and Zhuo Li. 2025. "Air Sketch: A Fast and Accurate Traffic Measurement Sketch with Multi-Class Overflow" Electronics 14, no. 11: 2143. https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics14112143

APA Style

Ma, T., Zhao, M., Li, D., Meng, J., Li, W., Luo, K., & Li, Z. (2025). Air Sketch: A Fast and Accurate Traffic Measurement Sketch with Multi-Class Overflow. Electronics, 14(11), 2143. https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics14112143

Note that from the first issue of 2016, this journal uses article numbers instead of page numbers. See further details here.

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Air Sketch: A Fast and Accurate Traffic Measurement Sketch with Multi-Class Overflow

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