A scalable multi-core aware software architecture for high-performance network monitoring
Mahdi Dashtbozorgi, Mohammad Abdollahi Azgomi · 2009
This paper proposes a high-performance network monitoring software architecture. The proposed architecture, named DashNMon, is able to employ multi-core CPUs in an efficient and scalable manner. Multi-core awareness is a distinguished property of this architecture. In spite of most existing cluster-based solutions, DashNMon can be used with common-off-the-shelf (COTS) multi-core CPUs. DashNMon is based on DashCap high-performance packet capture and transmission software solution, which we have recently introduced. Using the proposed architecture, it is possible to design and implement high-performance multi-threaded NIDSs or application-layer firewalls, completely in the user space and with better utilization of computational resources of multi-processor/multi-core systems. In this paper, after a brief overview of DashCap, we introduce the scalable software architecture of DashNMon and the results of the experiments carried out using a prototype web filter to benchmark its performance and scalability.