Section: New Results

An Inexpensive Packet Capture Solution with Robust and Accurate Timestamping

The availability of inexpensive and reliable packet capture solutions is highly desirable for the management of future Internet infrastructures and practices. Currently, available solutions are either 1) based on GPS antennas and dedicated hardware and thus are expensive and difficult to deploy, or 2) based on commodity hardware and standard synchronization protocols and thus have inaccurate timestamps and cannot handle monitoring at high rate. In a series of ongoing works in collaboration with the Melbourne University (Australia), we proposed an architecture for a packet monitoring solution which combines inexpensive network cards capable of hardware timestamping, with RAD- clock, an open source software clock. In different papers, we presented the first implementation and evaluation of our approach, demonstrating a good compromise between affordability and accuracy [33] , [36] .