Improving network traffic acquisition and processing with the Java Virtual Machine

While network traffic acquisition and processing is typically done with languages like C that allow low-level hardware access and optimizations, languages like Java and their ecosystems aim at easing complex tasks. With a combination of both, strengths can be combined such that more powerful and versatile network traffic processing systems can be engineered. However, while approaches using languages like C are evolved and optimized, network traffic acquisition and processing with the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is not equivalently optimized and benefits from employing JVM-based languages are not fully exploited yet. We present methods for increasing the network traffic processing performance with the JVM and examples for leveraging dynamic capabilities via a domain specific language and self-adaptivity. We measured improvements by factors of up to 5.9 compared to the old approach and capture rates up to 4.46 million packets per second and could show that the prototype is capable to self-adapt based on performance constraints.