An optimized solution of application layer protocol identification based on regular expressions

Abstract

Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) is a widely used network protocol identification technology. Currently, Data flows on Internet are growing in every minute. Therefore, it's urgently demanded to improve the processing performance of the DPI engine. In this paper, we proposed an optimized solution based on regular expressions. We used an optimized algorithm to reduce the number of states of a deterministic finite automaton, in order to reduce memory space requirement of the DPI engine. Meanwhile, we improved the matching performance of the DPI engine by adopting a hybrid packet matching pattern.