Capturing, Controlling and Analyzing Network Traffic using Network Processor

Abstract

The fundamental method used for network performance monitoring or for network security implementations is network traffic analysis. Network traffic analysis includes capturing of data from network and inspecting of data at each layer. The exponential growth of Internet traffic, network bandwidth and Internet based applications rise problems of performance, flexibility in network traffic analysis. Flexibility achieved through the programmable devices like General purpose processors (GPP’s) and performance can achieve through hardwired solutions like Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA’s). With GPP’s we can’t achieve wire speed performance, with FPGA technology is we can’t achieve flexibility. These situations have given rise to a new breed of programmable microprocessors called network processors. Network processors are new generation technology, which is designed to address the performance and flexibility problems. Network processors, analyzes Lower level layers by hardware and higher level layer by software with parallel and pipelined architecture. With multiple microengines and with parallel and pipelining programming architecture network processors makes network processing at wire speed.