A Study on Packet Capture Mechanisms in Real Time Network Traffic

The evolution of packet capture technology has made substantial advances in packet capture whereby both software and hardware solutions have been designed to optimize packet capture performance. Packet capture is the process of capturing data packets across a computer network. Packet capture has become more challenging with the advent of fast speed networks. The complexity of capturing in high packet rates and high bandwidth creates the need for more sophisticated packet capture mechanism in real-time network traffic. Existing solutions are able to capture packets; however at certain rates in high speed network, packets will be lost. Thus, this paper aims to classify and compare the existing solutions and to address their inherent issues.