NetOdyssey - A New Tool for Real-Time Analysis of Network Traffic

Abstract

Traffic monitoring and analysis is of critical importance for managing and designing modern computer networks, and constitutes nowadays a very active research field. In most of their studies, researchers use techniques and tools that follow a statistical approach to obtain a deeper knowledge about the traffic behaviour. Network administrators also find great value in statistical analysis tools. Many of those tools return similar metrics calculated for common properties of network packets. This paper presents NetOdyssey, a new tool for the statistical analysis of network traffic. It is able to capture the traffic from the network card or from a pre-collected trace, and generates several statistics calculated for different traffic properties in separate threads. Its modular architecture allows one to adapt NetOdyssey to specific analysis purposes, resorting to the possibility to easily implement custom-made modules, whose implementation principles are also described in here.