Design and Implementation of Network Traffic Capture Prober Based on General PC

Abstract

Network traffic measurement provides scientific basis for designing, building, and managing the next generation Internet, and is especially important for monitoring network behavior. There are many challenges in high-speed network traffic measurement. One of the most important bottlenecks is traffic capturing. Because of hardware capability and operating system overhead limitations, the existing network traffic measurement tools based on software can only perform well at low speed network with the link rate below 100 Mbps. This paper mainly focuses on the key issue to perform traffic capture for high-speed network based on software. To achieve this point, Distributed network traffic measurement system is discussed, and a traffic capture prober was designed under general PC server with Linux operating system. We also analyze crucial problems on prober’s implementation, building an experiment environment and running tests on it. The results show that our system satisfies all requirements imposed by real time measuring network traffic behavior. Furthermore, the performance of traffic capture has been improved significantly and can capture/process nearly all packets at line speed under Gigabit network.