  Flow-based traffic measurement is a very challenging problem: Managing
counters for each individual traffic flow in hardware resources knowingly
struggle to scale with high-speed links. In this paper we propose a novel
lattice theory-based approach that improves flow-based measurement performances
and scales by keeping the number of the maintained hardware counters to a
minimum (result mathematically established in the paper). The crucial
contribution of the lattice is to map the computational semantics of the packet
processing to user requests for traffic measurement thus allowing for a
better-informed and focused counter assignment.
  An implementation over an Openflow switch, FlowME, was developed and
evaluated upon its memory usage, performance overhead, and processing effort to
generate the minimal solution. Experimental results indicate a significant
decrease in resource consumption.
