Quality of Experience Engineering for Customer Added Value Services: From Evaluation to Monitoring

6

High Speed Multimedia Flow Classification

Rafael LEIRA OSUNA, Pedro GÓMEZ NIETO, Ivan GONZÁLEZ VIDAL, Jorge E. LÓPEZ DE VERGARA.

The Internet is an ever-growing network. As such, network equipment has to be improved to cope with this growth, including those devices used to classify the network traffic. Internet service providers and network operators require the application of different quality of service (QoS) policies for specific protocols. Thus, such classifying systems are critical. However, classification by port does not provide good results, and it is necessary to apply other more complex techniques, such as deep packet inspection. These classification techniques have to be fast enough to work at line rates. This chapter presents a system that unifies the entire process involved in flow classification at high speed. It captures the traffic, builds flows from the received packets and, finally, classifies them inside a graphics processing unit (GPU). The whole process is possible at 10 Gbps using commodity hardware. Our results show that the achieved performance is greatly influenced by the number of protocols to find, and it is limited by the number of network flows. In any case, our system reaches up to 29.7 Gbps (about 14.5 Mega Flows per second).

6.1. Introduction

The Internet is growing and changing day by day, with more and more websites, protocols and end users. Each network flow on the Internet has an associated protocol. However classifying those protocols and ...