Tap Analysis

Through an agreement with the university, our research group along with Professor Curt Freeland have access to the Internet link. The access includes traffic traveling to and from the basic Internet as well as Internet2 through a tap in the basement of the Hesburgh library. Our current options for analyzing tap traffic includes capturing either outbound or inbound traffic for full scale logging to disk, logging whole packet payloads using Cheap Logger, or running checksum computations on the packet payloads.

Our continued work in this area includes examining various parallel architectures for more sophisticated signature extraction (GPU via nVidia's CUDA, PlayStation 3, etc.) as well as examination of the Intel IXP architecture (IXP 2350).

For our most recent work on Opportunistic Wireless Broadcast, we captured traffic over several days with consideration for the protocol type (TCP vs. UDP), direction (inbound/outbound), and the connectivity type of the host (wired, wireless). The full suite of results will posted as time allows along with a detailed discussion of the breakdown. For now, we highlight in particular the UDP traffic and the potential savings that can be derived from simple matching of the entire packet payload.