The Design of an Associative Processing system for Network Monitoring

This paper looks at the design of an embedded processor to be used for network traffic monitoring. This would operate on the stream of data between a network interface and a host computer. Associative processing techniques are used to implement multiple finite state machines that can be used to monitor various network streams or protocol layers. Network packets are selectively captured and passed along with other status information to a host computer for further processing. A first version of such a processor has been designed and modeled in VHDL. The processor design has been simulated and performance figures are presented in this paper along with some sample monitoring programs. This study shows that associative processing appears to be an efficient way to implement fast network monitoring tools.