Network Probe for Flexible Flow Monitoring

NetFlow, XML, FPGA, probe

Research in measurement and monitoring of Internet traffic is evolving rapidly but network tools that would be able to follow it are still rare. New approaches and methods are often tested in offline environment or on low-speed links using software solutions, but consecutive real-time deployment on high-speed links is missing.  In this context we propose a flexible network probe which is a foundation stone for further network measurement and monitoring. The architecture of the probe is based on a network acceleration card with Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) and a host computer.  The configuration for FPGA chips is automatically generated by a configuration program according to the user's definition of the monitored values in order to save hardware resources and increase the throughput. The definition of the monitoring process is described using XML, transformed to VHDL and synthesized. This enables the probe to gain any information about network traffic, assign it to the flow and process it, all of which can be arbitrarily defined by the user.