An extensible flow information export engine for traffic measurement

Abstract

Flow-based IP traffic measurement is a very important part of network monitoring. However, traffic measurement devices and flow exporting software have still too low performance to collect all flows. In this paper, we propose an extensible flow export engine, called XFix, on basis of a GPL tool, -nProbe, which is an efficient flow probe that supports for NetFlow v9/IPFIX. In the engine, we also propose some solutions and improvements in flow aggregation, which are able to improve the performance of the metering process, support bidirectional flow and reduce application information loss. Experimental results have shown its efficiency in multi-thread processing activity.