The structure of highspeed network monitoring on programmable NICs Master thesis

Knowledge of what data are carried by network links is crucial to be able to prevent attacks and to improve quality of services. Therefore it is important to develop network monitoring tools which can operate on speeds of new gigabit networks. This thesis discusses general principles of designing a highly flexible framework which is divided into several levels. These spread across various hardware and software environments. This allows us to keep up with a gigabit speed. Details are shown on an example which extends a previous implementation of the framework to run on top of an IXP based PCI board. This work also presents performance evaluation, discussion of bottle-necks, general problems and compares with other related projects.