A Protocol Analysis Platform Based on Open Source Software

Abstract

Protocol analysis is very important for engineers for developing a complicate communication system, or for network administrators for supervision and fault diagnosis. Although several commercial protocol analyzers are available in the markets, they are too expensive or difficult to be altered to fit in with the needs of new protocols. In this paper, we present a protocol analysis platform based on open source software, which provides a general, extensible, and easy-to-use framework. We have implemented and tested fully functional prototype for TETRA trunking system, which can provide bit-level packet inspection, performance statistics, message flow analysis, and application information extraction. We demonstrate the utility and flexibility of our platform by three application examples.