IPFIX Working Group B. Trammell
Internet-Draft ETH Zurich
Intended status: Standards Track A. Wagner
Expires: May 24, 2013 Consecom AG
B. Claise
Cisco Systems, Inc.
November 20, 2012
Flow Aggregation for the IP Flow Information Export (IPFIX) Protocol
draft-ietf-ipfix-a9n-08.txt
Abstract
This document provides a common implementation-independent basis for
the interoperable application of the IP Flow Information Export
(IPFIX) Protocol to the handling of Aggregated Flows, which are IPFIX
Flows representing packets from multiple Original Flows sharing some
set of common properties. It does this through a detailed
terminology and a descriptive Intermediate Aggregation Process
architecture, including a specification of methods for Original Flow
counting and counter distribution across intervals.
Status of this Memo
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.1. IPFIX Protocol Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.2. IPFIX Documents Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3. Use Cases for IPFIX Aggregation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
4. Architecture for Flow Aggregation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
4.1. Aggregation within the IPFIX Architecture . . . . . . . . 11
4.2. Intermediate Aggregation Process Architecture . . . . . . 15
4.2.1. Correlation and Normalization . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
5. IP Flow Aggregation Operations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
5.1. Temporal Aggregation through Interval Distribution . . . . 19
5.1.1. Distributing Values Across Intervals . . . . . . . . . 20
5.1.2. Time Composition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
5.1.3. External Interval Distribution . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
5.2. Spatial Aggregation of Flow Keys . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
5.2.1. Counting Original Flows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
5.2.2. Counting Distinct Key Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
5.3. Spatial Aggregation of Non-Key Fields . . . . . . . . . . 26
5.3.1. Counter Statistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
5.3.2. Derivation of New Values from Flow Keys and
non-Key fields . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
5.4. Aggregation Combination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
6. Additional Considerations and Special Cases in Flow
Aggregation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
6.1. Exact versus Approximate Counting during Aggregation . . . 28
6.2. Delay and Loss introduced by the IAP . . . . . . . . . . . 28
6.3. Considerations for Aggregation of Sampled Flows . . . . . 28
6.4. Considerations for Aggregation of Heterogeneous Flows . . 29
7. Export of Aggregated IP Flows using IPFIX . . . . . . . . . . 30
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