• network monitoring - packet processing

As internet is becoming a critical infrastructure and the amount of traffic
carried on it is rapidly growing, along with the potential security
threats, monitoring is becoming more and more a crucial activity to the
correct operations of networks and network based services. However,
the amount of data to be analyzed, the extreme variety of the analysis
to be supported, along with the need to correlate data from different
sources and the limitations imposed by the privacy legislation make
network monitoring a difficult and challenging task. In this work we explore
several research fields, all of them related to network monitoring
and testing. First of all, we propose tomographic techniques, that allow
to infer the internal state of the network by applying statistical analysis
to measurements carried out by the end–hosts, with no cooperation
from the internal nodes. We then illustrate novel algorithms and data
structures for speeding up expensive packet processing tasks, such as
deep packet inspection. Subsequently, we move on to architectural topics
and show how general purpose processors and special purpose devices
can complement each other in order to build monitoring and testing systems
offering an optimal trade–off between flexibility and performance.
Moreover, we also investigate on the potential that the modern commodity
hardware (which is highly parallel) provides and on how this can be
leveraged for the benefit of the network monitoring applications. Finally,
we delve into the topic of distributed monitoring and propose novel solutions
for building an overlay of monitoring probes which can efficiently
correlate the observed data, thus avoiding the scalability bottleneck of an
architecture based on a single collection point.