Bridging the Gap between Low-Level Network Traffic Data Acquisition and Higher-Level Frameworks

The combination of low-level network data acquisition and higher-level frameworks results in more powerful and efficient network analysis and surveillance systems and opens up new possibilities for leveraging low-level network traffic data. There is, however, a gap between low-level network traffic data acquisition techniques and higher-level frameworks. This gap complicates the integration of low-level tools into higher-level frameworks. In this paper, we exemplarily research the feasibility of bridging this gap. As example, we use the integration of low-level packet capturing with Java-based higher-level implementations. To assess the practicability, we created a prototype implementation and performed extensive performance measurements. The results show that our Java-based prototype is capable of capturing and processing network traffic in near real-time at Gigabit Ethernet speed on consumer-class commodity hardware.