High-Performance Network Traffic Processing Systems Using Commodity Hardware

The Internet has opened new avenues for information accessing and sharing in a variety of media formats. Such popularity has resulted in an increase of the amount of resources consumed in backbone links, whose capacities have witnessed numerous upgrades to cope with the ever-increasing demand for bandwidth. Consequently, network traffic processing at today’s data transmission rates is a very demanding task, which has been traditionally accomplished by means of specialized hardware tailored to specific tasks. However, such approaches lack either of flexibility or extensibility—or both. As an alternative, the research community has pointed to the utilization of commodity hardware, which may provide flexible and extensible cost-aware solutions, ergo entailing large reductions of the operational and capital expenditure investments. In this chapter, we provide a survey-like introduction to high-performance network traffic processing using commodity hardware. We present the required background to understand the different solutions proposed in the literature to achieve high-speed lossless packet capture, which are reviewed and compared.