Skip to main content

High-Performance Network Traffic Processing Systems Using Commodity Hardware

  • Chapter
Book cover Data Traffic Monitoring and Analysis

Abstract

The Internet has opened new avenues for information accessing and sharing in a variety of media formats. Such popularity has resulted in an increase of the amount of resources consumed in backbone links, whose capacities have witnessed numerous upgrades to cope with the ever-increasing demand for bandwidth. Consequently, network traffic processing at today’s data transmission rates is a very demanding task, which has been traditionally accomplished by means of specialized hardware tailored to specific tasks. However, such approaches lack either of flexibility or extensibility—or both. As an alternative, the research community has pointed to the utilization of commodity hardware, which may provide flexible and extensible cost-aware solutions, ergo entailing large reductions of the operational and capital expenditure investments. In this chapter, we provide a survey-like introduction to high-performance network traffic processing using commodity hardware. We present the required background to understand the different solutions proposed in the literature to achieve high-speed lossless packet capture, which are reviewed and compared.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. McKeown, N., Anderson, T., Balakrishnan, H., Parulkar, G., Peterson, L., Rexford, J., Shenker, S., Turner, J.: Openflow: enabling innovation in campus networks. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 38(2), 69–74 (2008)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Braun, L., Didebulidze, A., Kammenhuber, N., Carle, G.: Comparing and improving current packet capturing solutions based on commodity hardware. In: Proceedings of ACM Internet Measurement Conference (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Dobrescu, M., Egi, N., Argyraki, K., Chun, B.G., Fall, K., Iannaccone, G., Knies, A., Manesh, M., Ratnasamy, S.: Routebricks: exploiting parallelism to scale software routers. In: Proceedings of ACM SIGOPS Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Han, S., Jang, K., Park, K.S., Moon, S.: PacketShader: a GPU-accelerated software router. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 40(4), 195–206 (2010)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Mogul, J., Ramakrishnan, K.K.: Eliminating receive livelock in an interrupt-driven kernel. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 15(3), 217–252 (1997)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Kim, I., Moon, J., Yeom, H.Y.: Timer-based interrupt mitigation for high performance packet processing. In: Proceedings of the Conference on High Performance Computing in the Asia-Pacific Region (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Fusco, F., Deri, L.: High speed network traffic analysis with commodity multi-core systems. In: Proceedings of ACM Internet Measurement Conference (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Rizzo, L.: Netmap: a novel framework for fast packet I/O. In: Proceedings of USENIX Annual Technical Conference (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Bonelli, N., Di Pietro, A., Giordano, S., Procissi, G.: On Multi–gigabit Packet Capturing with Multi–core Commodity Hardware. In: Taft, N., Ricciato, F. (eds.) PAM 2012. LNCS, vol. 7192, pp. 64–73. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  10. Rizzo, L., Deri, L., Cardigliano, A.: 10 Gbit/s line rate packet processing using commodity hardware: survey and new proposals (2012), http://luca.ntop.org/10g.pdf

  11. Intel: 82599 10 Gbe controller datasheet (2012), http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ethernet-controllers/82599-10-gbe-controller-datasheet.html

  12. Microsoft: Receive Side Scaling, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff567236(v=vs.85).aspx

    Google Scholar 

  13. Woo, S., Park, K.: Scalable TCP session monitoring with Symmetric Receive-Side Scaling. Technical report KAIST (2012), http://www.ndsl.kaist.edu/~shinae/papers/TR-symRSS.pdf

  14. Dobrescu, M., Argyraki, K., Ratnasamy, S.: Toward predictable performance in software packet-processing platforms. In: Proceedings of USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Zabala, L., Ferro, A., Pineda, A.: Modelling packet capturing in a traffic monitoring system based on Linux. In: Proceedings of Performance Evaluation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Liao, G., Znu, X., Bnuyan, L.: A new server I/O architecture for high speed networks. In: Proceedings of Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Papadogiannakis, A., Vasiliadis, G., Antoniades, D., Polychronakis, M., Markatos, E.P.: Improving the performance of passive network monitoring applications with memory locality enhancements. Computer Communications 35(1), 129–140 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Wu, W., DeMar, P., Crawford, M.: Why can some advanced Ethernet NICs cause packet reordering? IEEE Communications Letters 15(2), 253–255 (2011)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Moreno, V., Santiago del Río, P.M., Ramos, J., Garnica, J.J., García-Dorado, J.L.: Batch to the future: Analyzing timestamp accuracy of high-performance packet I/O engines. IEEE Communications Letters 16(11), 1888–1891 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Su, W., Zhang, L., Tang, D., Gao, X.: Using direct cache access combined with integrated NIC architecture to accelerate network processing. In: Proceedings of IEEE Conference on High Performance Computing and IEEE Conference on Embedded Software and Systems (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Krasnyansky, M.: UIO-IXGBE (2012), https://opensource.qualcomm.com/wiki/UIO-IXGBE

  22. CAIDA: Traffic analysis research (2002-2012), http://www.caida.org/data/passive/trace_stats/

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

García-Dorado, J.L., Mata, F., Ramos, J., Santiago del Río, P.M., Moreno, V., Aracil, J. (2013). High-Performance Network Traffic Processing Systems Using Commodity Hardware. In: Biersack, E., Callegari, C., Matijasevic, M. (eds) Data Traffic Monitoring and Analysis. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7754. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36784-7_1

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36784-7_1

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-36783-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-36784-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics