Multimedia flow classification at 10 Gbps using acceleration techniques on commodity hardware

Internet is an ever-growing network. The network equipment has to be improved to cope with this growth, including those devices used to classify the network traffic. Internet service providers and network operators require to apply different QoS policies for specific protocols. Then, such classifying systems are critical. However, classification by port does not provide good results, and it is necessary to apply other more complex techniques. These classification techniques have to be fast enough to work at line rates. This paper presents a system that unifies the entire process involved in flow classification at high speed. It captures the traffic, builds flows from the received packets and finally classifies them inside a GPU. All the process is possible at 10 Gbps using commodity hardware. Our results show that the achieved performance is very influenced by the number of protocols to find, and it is limited by the number of network flows. In any case, our system reaches up to 24.4 Gbps using commodity hardware.