On the Feasibility of Inter-Flow Service Degradation Detection

Hardware acceleration in modern networks creates monitoring blind spots by offloading flows to a non-observable state, hindering real-time service degradation (SD) detection. To address this, we propose and formalize a novel inter-flow correlation framework, built on the hypothesis that observable flows can act as environmental sensors for concurrent, non-observable flows. We conduct a comprehensive statistical analysis of this inter-flow landscape, revealing a fundamental trade-off: while the potential for correlation is vast, the most explicit signals (i.e., co-occurring SD events) are sparse and rarely perfectly align. Critically, however, our analysis shows these signals frequently precede degradation in the target flow, validating the potential for timely detection. We then evaluate the framework using a standard machine learning model. While the model achieves high classification accuracy, a feature-importance analysis reveals it relies primarily on simpler intra-flow features. This key finding demonstrates that harnessing the complex contextual information requires more than simple models. Our work thus provides not only a foundational analysis of the inter-flow problem but also a clear outline for future research into the structure-aware models needed to solve it.