Survey of Network Traffic Monitoring Tools

Measuring IP traffic generated by devices connected to an IP network is the first step of several key operations of network management: load balancing, intrusion detection, performance monitoring, generation of traffic statistics, or charging for connection time, bandwidth used or volume transferred. Depending on the granularity of the collected data as well as on the type of link on which traffic is measured the information gathered may range from a few kilobytes per hour (for example in case of hourly SNMP queries) up to gigabytes per second (in case of flow accounting of high-speed links).

This VA work shall look into existing tools and algorithms used for IP traffic measurement and shall generate a survey over the state of the art in IP traffic measurements. The work shall start with the investigation of well-known standardized tools (such as SNMP, NetraMet, Cisco NetFLow) and then will move into the more challanging and interesting world of research by looking into different proposals that try to address the shortcomings of those standart measurement tools with respect to (very) high-speed traffic measurement.