Optimization of flow record handling by applying a decentralized cooperative semantic caching approach

Analyzing IP traffic is an important task on which many network management applications are based. Cisco´s Net-Flow system is one of the most widely used approaches for accomplishing a measurement and collection of flow records, needed to analyze traffic. Working with NetFlow means to involve very large amounts of data, while the collection, storing, and enabling of analyzers demands the access to this data in the fastest possible manner. Thus, this paper addresses this challenging task and presents a newly developed cooperative caching approach (CoopSC) that can be used to improve access time and data transfers between the centralized flow-based storage solution and those analyzers in operation. Such an improvement can positively influence the performance of flow-based solutions. Therefore, this approach NMCoopSC (Network Management CoopSC) has been validated, and experiments show that NMCoopSC improves the performance of NetFlow-based range queries.