A Heterogeneous Service-Oriented Deep Packet Inspection and Analysis Framework for Traffic-Aware Network Management and Security Systems

Abstract

A variety of Web-based applications, mobile apps, and other over the top data services with affordable 3G/4G enabled smart devices are major factors for enormous increase in heterogeneous data traffic at enterprise and mobile networks. This creates challenges regarding traffic management and requires traffic-aware intelligent network management to deliver sustained quality of experience for subscribers. Deep packet inspection and analysis (DPIA) provides base platform for development of traffic-aware intelligent network management and security systems. However, computationally complex DPIA-related packet processing for high speed data traffic makes these systems expensive. Furthermore, conventionally these traffic-aware network management and security systems are deployed in enterprise networks with independent and dedicated DPIA-related processing resources and require multiple copies of passively provisioned high speed data from network, while performing similar DPIA operations over the same data again and again. This duplicate deployment of expensive software and hardware resources for DPIA processing eventually results in higher capital expenditures as well as operational expenditures for network operators. We have proposed a novel service-oriented framework for heterogeneous deep packet inspection and analysis (SoDPI) that simultaneously provides diversified DPIA services to multiple client applications for network management and security operations in high-speed networks. Proposed framework provides flexible and comprehensive API-based service interface for client applications to register required DPIA services. SoDPI framework implementation is based on commodity hardware and deploys shared set of DPIA-related packet processing components, requiring only single copy of passive data provisioned from network. Experimental evaluations show that novel SoDPI framework requires considerably reduced amount of software and hardware resources to fulfill heterogeneous DPIA packet processing requirements for multiple client applications in comparison with conventional network management and security applications with dedicated DPIA components. This results in lower cost impacts for network operators with more network manageability.