Duet: Towards Efficient and Accurate Sketch-Based Measurement on DPUs

Sketch-based measurement has become a fundamental primitive for monitoring network traffic and supporting performance-critical data center applications. However, existing approaches for deploying sketches on DPUs either underutilize DPU hardware capabilities or suffer from degraded accuracy due to limited Arm-side processing capacity and multi-core contention. In particular, most designs directly port host-side sketch implementations to the DPU Arm subsystem, introducing excessive forwarding overhead and hardware pressure. In this paper, we present Duet, an efficient and accurate sketch-based measurement on DPUs. Duet adopts a layered measurement architecture that dynamically schedules flows between Arm-based sketches and the DPU hardware forwarding pipeline according to traffic characteristics. Heavy flows are offloaded to hardware tables to leverage line-rate processing and relieve Arm-side contention, while light flows are retained in software sketches to avoid excessive hardware table updates. To further address crosslayer aggregation and multi-core concurrency challenges, Duet incorporates a zeroing mechanism and lock-free optimizations to ensure measurement consistency and accuracy. We implement Duet on an NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPU and conduct extensive experiments on a real testbed. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared with traditional sketch-based measurement approaches, Duet improves throughput by a factor of approximately $7.1 , packet rate by a factor of approximately $28.9 , and measurement accuracy by approximately 50.1%.