A Low Power, Programmable Networking Platform and Development Environment - Advances in Network-Embedded Management and Applications - page 31

5 Case Studies

The platform itself is capable of high-speed packet processing but can be
extended with industrial PC boards for complex functions and increased
processing power. Therefore it can perform all network related functions from
the low level high-speed packet forwarding to the most complex protocol
processing.
These packet processing architectures also utilize powerful energy
management techniques. First, power islands can be formed, and unused
islands may be powered down. Furthermore, local power management is used
where possible by turning on the processing modules only if they are needed.
Finally, a central manager provides a management interface for the control of
the power islands.
In the following we present several specific use cases for the SCALOPES
C-board.

5.1 A Network Monitoring System with DPI Capabilities

Traffic monitoring plays an important role in network management, network
optimization and planning. Operators are usually aware of only the main
characteristics of the traffic, which generally is limited to an average
throughput with 1-minute granularity. On the other hand, information about
fine granularity of the traffic allows for network tuning and more effective
planning. As the operators switch to 10GbE connections, processing packets
and flows real time at this speed is getting more and more important - no
matter how complex this task really is. Deep packet inspection and flow
analysis cannot be carried out with on this rate by using the currently
available processors and memories, hence the traffic is going to be filtered
and distributed over several processors outside the C-board for full analysis.
In this use-case we present a monitoring system capable of DPI at line speed.
Furthermore, we show that using our easy development environment the DPI
can be easily tailored to the specific requirements. The high-level workflow of
DPI and flow analysis in this system works the in the way depicted by Fig. 5 .
The C-board receives the monitored traffic through the 10Gbps XFPs, and
initially timestamp each packet. Depending on their configuration, the filter
modules pass “interesting” packets to the forwarding buffer, and sends these
to flow classification with the rest of the traffic. The classifier puts together
flows based on the packet