On the design and performance of an Internet application traffic monitoring system

In recent years, traffic measurement and analysis have received significant attention due to the increased requirements from various aspects such as SLA monitoring, P2P traffic monitoring and security attacks, etc. But technical challenges have been increased as well because link speed and traffic volume to measure have become huge and the characteristics of Internet applications, which takes major portion of entire traffic volume, have changed dramatically. Traffic measurement system has to deal with very high-speed links such as OC-48 and above. Newly emerging applications such as P2P, streaming, and network game applications don't follow the traditional application identification method, that is, the use of fixed port numbers. These applications, however, take most of the Internet bandwidth. In this paper, we propose novel mechanisms to cope with such challenges and provide performance study results of them. We have incorporated the proposed mechanisms into our proof-of-concept system called WiseTrafView, whose main target application is usage-based accounting.