The Design And Implementation Of Traffic Measurement System Based On Network Processor

With the rapid developing of the Internet's expansion and isomerization, network performance monitoring and management is strongly required. The network traffic's survey and analysis is a necessary and important part of network management. The network administrator could use it to monitor the network current traffic and analysis the network service condition and performance. Then, he can find the network performance's bottleneck as soon as possible, and modify the network's route, distribute the network traffic and resources, to guarantee that the network is highly effective, stable and reliable.The conventional network traffic measurement system need to use the ASIC devices such as switch or router, which can produce sFlow or NetFlow sampling packets. The cost may be very high, and it is hardly to upgrade. Once the traffic sampling's request change, it would be difficult to modify the sampling mechanism and the sampling data's format. Network processor has the characteristic of ASIC hardware's high performance and software solution's flexibility simultaneously and will be widely used in the next generation networking. Therefore, it is a most important and meaningful job to research the applications of a network processor.This research task is executed exactly on Intel IXA. After analyzing the IXA portability framework and the architecture of IXP2400, using the network traffic sampling technology such as sFlow, we implemented a function of network traffic sampling. Its sub-function consists of the basic network bridge, data filter and packet sampling. There are flow, counter and delay information in the sample data. And we implemented a network traffic measurement system based on IXA, which is easy to upgrade for the network traffic control system. Intel IXA is a network exchange framework based on Intel IXP network processors. It consists of three key units: micro engines, Intel Xscale core microstructure and Intel IXA Portability Framework.This paper introduces the backgrounds of network processor and traffic measurement at first. Then, after analyzing the character of Intel IXA network processors, it shows the superiority of traffic measurement system based it. It also describes the method and achievement on research, design and implement of the system. At last, it summarizes the experience and prospects for development in this subject.