TT-INT: A Time-Threshold-Based Lightweight In-Band Network Telemetry Scheme for P4-Enabled Programmable Networks

In-band Network Telemetry (INT) has emerged as a promising solution for fine-grained, real-time monitoring in programmable data planes. However, existing INT approaches often incur excessive overhead due to per-hop metadata accumulation or lack fine-grained control over telemetry frequency. This paper presents TT-INT, a lightweight INT framework designed for P4-enabled networks, which introduces a time-threshold-based mechanism to regulate telemetry insertion dynamically. Each switch enforces local constraints based on per-flow time intervals and metadata capacity, enabling reduced overhead while preserving path visibility. Additionally, TT-INT supports a two-window byte-level anomaly detector and a controller-driven adjustment mechanism for further extensibility. Experiments on a real-worldderived backbone topology demonstrate that TT-INT reduces the average per-packet telemetry overhead to as low as 3.4 bytes under the 100 ms/5v configuration at 300 pps, achieving a 97.1% reduction compared to P4-INT under the same traffic rate. Compared to DLINT-5v and PLINT-5v (fixed at 20 and 26 bytes per packet, respectively), TT-INT-5v-100ms achieves up to 83.0% and 86.9% lower overhead. It also reaches a maximum path update detection rate of 97.9% (under the 50 ms configuration) and a minimum detection delay of 0.2 seconds, confirming TT-INT's effectiveness in balancing overhead, responsiveness, and monitoring fidelity under high-throughput conditions.