Traffic analysis

Comparing network traffic probes based on commodity hardware

Authors:
Luis Zabala, Alberto Pineda, Armando Ferro, Daniel Fernández
Year:
2014
Journal:
The Thirteenth International Conference on Networks (ICN 2014). Nice, France. February 23-27
Description:

Due to the fact that, nowadays, it is possible to capture traffic in 1-10 Gigabit Ethernet networks using commodity hardware, many traffic monitoring systems, and especially capturing tools, have been proposed in recent years. This paper presents a comparison between two software probes named Adviser and Ksensor. Both of them are multi-processor systems and are built over conventional hardware. However, while Adviser is designed in user space, Ksensor runs in kernel space. This work compares the performance results of the two probes considering several capture engines (NAPI, PF_RING with DNA, PFQ) and, at the same time, different application or analysis loads. The evaluations of the probes with the different settings have been performed on the same hardware multi-core configuration. The results of the evaluations let conclude which solution is better in each situation and which solution must be discarded.