Proposal and evaluation of multistage distributed traffic monitoring system

For network management, collection methods of administrative information based on traffic monitoring have been used widely. However, in a network that is divided into segments by switches and routers, different traffic is observed for each segment, so that there is a difference in the fault detection capability using the threshold mechanism and the collection of sufficient administrative information by packet analysis may not be possible. In this paper, the effects of network segmentation on the detection capability and the collection capability of traffic monitoring are pointed out. Subsequently, to resolve this problem, a multistage distributed traffic monitoring method is proposed in which several agents are dynamically linked in a manager/agent-type traffic monitoring environment. The present method is applied to the fault management and security monitoring of a real network and the effectiveness of the method is demonstrated.