SONAR: A scalable stream-oriented system for real-time network traffic measurements

Abstract

Accurate and real-time network measurements are becoming increasingly critical for a large variety of management tasks like accounting, bandwidth provisioning and security analysis. However, existing network measurement techniques have major limitations in supporting scalable and real-time traffic data monitoring and analyzing on high-speed (10Gbps and beyond) network links. Therefore, we propose a novel real-time network measurement system, named SONAR, which facilitates the convergence of real-time network monitoring and traffic analysis. We illustrate how the proposed system is designed and implemented based on streaming computing technologies, and demonstrate its capabilities with a built-in abnormal traffic detection application. The proposed system, based on real-world actualization and evaluation, has been demonstrated to be a high-performance and scalable solution for real-time network traffic measurements.