Implementation of an IPFIX compliant flow traffic meter: challenges and performance assessment

Several tools are already available for measuring IP traffic flows. However, a standard for exporting results is still missing and the IETF IPFIX WG (IP flow information export working group) is currently working towards this target. We present a prototype implementation of an IPFIX compliant flow meter and discuss its major challenges. Through an extensive profiling activity, we try to point out which operations are most critical for scalability issues. The latter can be raised by both a large number of contemporary flows and a high packet input rate. We finally provide some indicative figures of the incoming traffic rate, which can be reliably monitored with the platform we used to test our implementation.