Enabling open-source high speed network monitoring on NetFPGA

Abstract

Abstract-Network measurement both as diagnostic and within measurement-based techniques of traffic engineering and management, alongside network measurement for security has maintained the needs of researchers and network operators for the ongoing development of measurement tools for traffic monitoring/characterisation and to support Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs). Many such tools capitalise on the pricing of commodity hardware by operating on general purpose architectures. Many are based on the well known libpcap API, a de facto standard in this area. Despite the many improvements that have been applied to packet capturing, packet-monitoring implementations still suffer from either: performance flaws on commodity hardware due mainly to unresolvable hardware bottlenecks, or costly and inflexible niche systems. To address such issues, the paper proposes a system architecture based on the cooperation of NetFPGA and a general purpose host PC. The NetFPGA is an open networking platform accelerator that enables rapid development of hardware-accelerated packet processing applications. The objective is to combine the high performance of a hardwareoriented solution with the flexibility of general purpose PCs.

Test and monitoring of LTE network: A step towards low cost solutions based on NetFPGA

“…The high performance and accuracy in the acquiring traffic data in high-speed links given by the NetFPGA platform should be integrated with a flexible software framework that permits an easily development of customized monitoring applications. Leveraging on the software framework presented in [4], the authors obtained the same accuracy of an Endace DAG card (http://www.endace.com/, it represents a widely respected benchmark for hardware measurement solutions), which costs as much as three times that of a NetFPGA.…”

“…Real time monitoring For this function, the software framework presented in [4] has been used. The software permits to acquire traffic data by the NetFPGA card and to pass them to the host PC.…”

“…The software permits to acquire traffic data by the NetFPGA card and to pass them to the host PC. As explained in [4], some further optimizations are necessary in the NetFPGA driver to achieve a transfer rate from the PCI card to the host PC higher than 90 Kpps. However, these first tests permitted to observe the load of the observed eNodeB for evaluating the behaviour of the LTE end users.…”

High-density network flow monitoring

“…Antichi et al [9] propose to use NetFPGA platform for passive network measurement. They note that without hardware support, the packet timestamps have poor accuracy.…”

A Passive Network Appliance for Real-Time Network Monitoring

“…To do this, a network monitor must capture every packet sent through the network. Unfortunately, most hardware options are expensive or difficult to develop or modify so they are not in wide use [1,3]. Software options are lower cost and offer more flexibility but are typically slower than their functionally equivalent hardware counterparts [6].…”