Monitoring of communication networks

Lossless monitoring of high-speed Ethernet connections within the service network (core) or data centres is no longer possible purely with software-based solutions. Most of the monitoring tasks need to be supported by hardware acceleration in order to be able to analyze traffic at 100 Gb/s or greater speed without any information loss (i.e., 1:1 sampling). Another challenge is that the quality of transmission typically is not only need to be measured at one access point, but at several points within the infrastructure. To realize this, a large number of synchronization tasks have to be carried out with great accuracy between the measuring devices (for example clock synchronization in the range 10-7s - 10-9 s).

Investigation the quality of infocommunication services

Beyond the objective network QoS parameters, service providers are increasingly focusing on the quality of experience (QoE) perceived by their users, trying to keep it at an adequate level. An interesting research area, whether it is possible to infer subjective quality from measurable objective traffic parameters and, if so, how to do it. One of the most important issues for today’s media services is how we can estimate the perceived quality in real time (online) without referencing and decoding the media content. The network neutrality – that is, the generally source-, target-, content- and volume-neutral management of the traffic of infocommunication networks, today is an issue that has been discussed by legislators and regulators all over the world. Existing EU regulations, however, foresee the need for monitoring systems to verify and control compliance with network neutrality. These systems should simultaneously keep track the requisites of various applications, and investigate whether changes in transmission conditions within the service network significantly affects the perceived quality.

Network function acceleration

Over the past decade, the ever-accelerating development of network features has highlighted the need for hardware reconfiguration in many areas. New requirements for network hardware elements have emerged that FPGA technology can efficiently satisfy due to its hardware reconfiguration property. In parallel with this, FPGA is competitive with ASIC-based solutions in terms of a number of critical parameters: real-time, parallel and lossless packet processing, and high throughput.