Survey of the issues surrounding network traffic monitoring

As networks are continuously growing, their operation and management are becoming more and more complex. In consequence, current network monitoring systems generate a huge volume of measurement data which represents one of the most critical issues in the management of computer networks. This paper is dedicated to the challenges in network traffic monitoring. It provides a brief overview of several issues that arise during traffic measurements. We inspect the issues from three viewpoints: (1) the impact on the inter-networking devices, (2) resource asymmetry and (3) real-time data evaluation. To quantify the volume of measurement data and its cost we also performed two experiments. They were focused (1) on the estimation of the average volume of data that must be processed during monitoring along with its impact on system resources and (2) on the cost of interpretation of the measurement data. The paper is concluded by some remarks on the directions at which should the research and development be aimed as well as with a brief introduction of our idea for addressing the described issues.