| dc.description.abstract | Internet and Intranet network traffic increase due to the use of World Wide Web and
other applications. Hence determining which host and application generates/using lots of
network traffic is very significant in managing and utilizing network resources effectively.
For many years Internet and Intranet traffic monitoring application has been developed to
be executed on personal computer (PC) with high processing power. Thus the benefit of
low cost, small size and portability which embedded system has to offer has never been
benefited by these kinds of applications. The emergence of embedded Linux had driven
developers to take up the challenge of developing high processing power application on
embedded Linux platform. This research describes the design and development of an
Embedded Network Traffic Monitoring (ENTM) system based on single board computer
(SBC) and an open source embedded Linux operating system (OS). The developed ENTM
system is capable of probing network packets, analyze the probe data and display the
results of the analyzed and raw data. This system is a handy device for network
administrator in analyzing incoming and outgoing network traffic. The main hardware
components of ENTM system are the TS-5400 SBC, LCD panel, keypad and Compact
Flash (CF) card. The ENTM software system is composed of four modules namely System
Control (SC), Network Packet probe (NPP), Packet Analysis (PA) and View Module
(VM). The SC module act as an interface/menu to execute various functionalities of the
system and the integration of external devices (Keypad and LCD panel) to the SBC. The
NPP module capture packets from a network segment, extract the packets information and
store them into a temporary data buffer for further analysis. The PA module keeps track of
global and individual-host information into files for viewing. The VM is used to display
the analyze data through any web browser. To ensure reliability and practicality, analysis
of the system performance is significant. Thus, the ENTM system performance is
compared against execution of the software on Desktop PC and Wireshark, a well known
competitive network analyzer. The experimental results shows that the data capture and
packet capture rates of ENTM system is very much identical (less than 0.5% variation)
during execution on Desktop PC and Wireshark regardless of its low CPU speed and
memory size. The results prove that ENTM design and implementation is highly
competitive eventhough of the hardware specification has low proccessing power and
memory. | en_US |
