Enabling high-speed and extensible real-time communications monitoring

The use of the Internet as a medium for real-time communications has grown significantly over the past few years. However, the best-effort model of this network is not particularly well-suited to the demands of users who are familiar with the reliability, quality and security of the public switched telephone network. If the growth is to continue, monitoring and real time analysis of communication data will be needed in order to ensure good call quality, and should degradation occur, to take corrective action. Writing this type of monitoring application is difficult and time consuming: VoIP traffic not only tends to use dynamic ports, but its real-time nature, along with the fact that its packets tend to be small, impose non-trivial performance requirements. In this paper we present RTC-Mon, the real-time communications monitoring framework, which provides an extensible platform for the quick development of high-speed, real-time monitoring applications. While the focus is on VoIP traffic, the framework is general and is capable of monitoring any type of real-time communications traffic. We present testbed performance results for the various components of RTC-Mon, showing that it can monitor a large number of concurrent flows without losing packets. In addition, we implemented a proof-of-concept application that can not only track statistics about a large number of calls and their users, but that consists of only 800 lines of code, showing that the framework is efficient and that it also significantly reduces development time.