How to Build DPI Products? (Part XXIII -DPI by GPU)

Article by Alysson Feitoza Santos, Stenio Flavio de Lacerda Fernandes, Petrônio Gomes Lopes Júnior, Djamel Fawzi Hadj Sadok (pictured), UFPE, Recife, Brazil and Geza Szabo Ericsson Research, Budapest, Hungary.

ABSTRACT

Traffic Identification is a crucial task performed by ISP administrators to evaluate and improve network service quality. Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) is a well-known technique used to identify networked traffic. DPI relies mostly on Regular Expressions (REs) evaluated by Finite Automata. Many previous studies have investigated the impacts on the classification accuracy of such systems when inspecting only a portion of the traffic. However, none have discussed the real impacts on the overall system throughput. This work presents a novel technique to perform DPI on Graphics Processing Units (GPU) called Flow-Based Traffic Identification (FBTI) and a proof-of-concept prototype analysis. Basically we want to increase DPI systems? performance on commodity platforms as well as their capacity to identify networked traffic on high speed links. By combining Deterministic Finite Automaton (DFA) for evaluating REs and flow-level packet sampling we achieve a raw performance of over 60 Gbps on GPUs. Our prototype solution could reach a real throughput of over 12 Gbps, measured as the identified volume of flows.

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