Network traffic monitoring system and monitoring method

Abstract

In a network traffic monitoring system and method for capturing a service distribution to monitor an IP network using Diffserv protocol, each IP packet on the network is monitored by extracting DSCP and IP addresses from a header of the packet. Then, traffic information is accumulated for each service class and for each sub network address, using the extracted information.

Description

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0001] 1. Field of the Invention[0002] The invention relates to a network traffic monitoring system and a network traffic monitoring method which is used in the system and, in particular, to the traffic monitoring method which is used in a large scale IP (Internet Protocol) network.[0003] 2. Description of the Related Art[0004] In a conventional traffic monitoring method, it is usual that a source IP address and a destination IP address are read from an IP header, and counting operation of packets is performed based on a species of an upper or a host application which is identified from a pair of the source and the destination IP addresses together with a port number defined on the fourth layer of the hierarchical model known in the art. Briefly, traffic is monitored on the basis of counts of the counting operation in the conventional traffic monitoring method.[0005] On the other hand, a new protocol has been proposed by IETF (Internet Engineering Task For...

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Benefits of technology

[0012] Furthermore, it is an object of the invention to provide a network traffic monitoring system and a monitoring method used in the system, which are capable of grasping a distribution of services which is important to know about performance of the network in an IP network using Diffserv protocol. As a result, the system and the method can adapt to a large scale network.

[0020] Therefore, according to the network traffic monitoring system, it is capable of reducing data to be gathered, since the data are put together by monitoring network traffic (packets) for each service and for each sub network. Consequently, the system can be applied to a large scale network.

Problems solved by technology

However, when the conventional traffic monitoring method is operated in accordance with the Diffserv protocol, the method can not capture the transferring priority provided by Diffserv protocol and can not monitor what service is assigned to a network.

Further, since the conventional traffic monitoring method also classifies packets transferred by using end-to-end protocol, the number of IP addresses to be treated is inevitably increased.

In consequence, a memory capacity of traffic monitor unit is increased and a burden on a network manager is increased, as the scale of a network becomes large.

Therefore, the conventional traffic monitoring method can not cope with enlargement of the network.

Furthermore, in a protocol, such as IPsec (Security Architecture for Internet Protocol) or IPoverIP, each packet can not be classified for each application, since it is not able to monitor a port number of the fourth layer protocol in a network using the above-exemplified protocols.

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