Title: Distributed Architecture for Real-Time Traffic Analysis
Author: Cristian Morariu
e-mail: morariu@ifi.uzh.ch
Partner: UniZH
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Burkhard Stiller
Committee: Prof. Dr. Burkharad Stiller, NN
Year of start: 2004
Year of end: 2009
Funding institution: University of Zurich

The goal of this doctoral thesis is the design and prototypical implementation of an architecture for distributed analysis of IP traffic. As network link speeds increase year-by-year having stand-alone devices that perform traffic analysis becomes unfeasible. A distributed platform for traffic analysis would leverage the processing requirements of such a task by combining resources of multiple devices performing traffic analysis. The thesis shall investigate three different areas of traffic analysis: capturing data on high-speed links, analysis of captured data, and storage of analysis results for further processing by third-party applications.

Brief description of the scope and objectives of the PhD thesis:

• Evaluation of existing traffic monitoring tools and approaches
• Analysis of requirements for a generic traffic analysis platform using at least two different scenarios
• Design of the architecture
• Prototypical implementation of the distributed platform for traffic analysis
• Evaluation of the approach based on the prototypical implementation

1. C. Morariu, B. Stiller: A Distributed Architecture for IP Traffic Analysis. Autonomous Infrastructure, Management and Security (AIMS 2007), Oslo, Norway, June 2007.
2. C. Morariu, M. Feier, B. Stiller: LINUBIA: A Linux-supported User-Based IP Accounting. 18th IFIP/IEEE International Workshop on Distributed Systems: Operations and Management (DSOM 2007), San Jose, USA, October 2007.