Comparing and improving current packet capturing solutions based on commodity hardware
Lothar Braun, Alexander Didebulidze, Nils Kammenhuber, Georg Carle · 2010
Capturing network traffic with commodity hardware has become a feasible task: Advances in hardware as well as soft- ware have boosted off-the-shelf hardware to performance levels that some years ago were the domain of expensive special-purpose hardware. However, the capturing hardware still needs to be driven by a well-performing software stack in order to minimise or avoid packet loss. Improving the capturing stack of Linux and FreeBSD has been an extensively covered research topic in the past years. Although the majority of the proposed enhancements have been backed by evaluations, these have mostly been conducted on different hardware platforms and software versions, which renders a comparative assessment of the various approaches difficult, if not impossible.