A Scalable and Cost-Effective Framework for Traffic Monitoring in Virtual LANs

As a consequence of the diffusion of more interactive services, such as Voice over IP (VoIP) and Web 2.0 ones, the resulting data flows need a proper de- gree of Quality of Service (QoS) not to be endangered. In addition, the aggressive traffic patterns produced by peer-to-peer (p2p) applications have to be monitored to avoid uncontrolled traffic bloats and diffusion of malicious software. Besides, the increasing complexity of LAN deployments, including the availability of IEEE 802.1q, account for some challenges when developing an infrastructure devoted to traffic monitoring operations. In this perspective, the paper presents the design and the deployment of a scalable and cost-effective framework based on collectors and probes, which has been built on top two open source components: nTop and nProbe. To evaluate the effectiveness of the approach, we tested the system in a real environment.