Design of A Multi-Path Reconfigurable Traffic Monitoring System

Abstract

As network bandwidth consumption continues to grow exponentially, real-time traffic data analysis becomes increasingly challenging and expensive. In many cases, network traffic monitoring can only be achieved via hardware Test Access Point (TAP) devices. Due to the intrusiveness and inflexibility of deploying hardware devices, this approach is intractable within an SDN environment where dynamic network resource allocation is key to the orchestration of network services. This paper presents a novel mirror tunnel design to achieve near hardware level TAP-as-a-Service (TaaS) performance through network device mirror offloading, while retaining resource reconfigurability. Mirror tunneling is a hybrid approach whereby a software TAP transports traffic from a source device to a mirror tunnel device. Traffic is then mirrored in place and sent to the destination device. The combination of a software TAP with the mirroring capabilities of the underlying hardware empowers system administrators to create a dynamically reconfigurable multi-path traffic mirroring system. As demonstrated in the benchmark results, this approach is efficient in terms of network bandwidth consumption and computational resources. In addition, this methodology is designed to mirror traffic in high-throughput environments with minimal to no impact on the source Virtual Network Functions (VNFs).