Monitoring, capturing and analysis of mission-critical traffic in experimental communication networks

The NATO C3 Agency (NC3A) is NATO's technical research centre for Command and Control, Operations Research and Communication and Information Systems (CIS). This paper briefly introduces the various NC3A testbed and prototyping activities in deployable CIS. It then focuses on the challenges of network convergence to future, quality of service (QoS) capable all-IP networks in support of expeditionary operations. To master these future challenges, it is important to study and understand traffic flows and network status of IP networks, as well as user and application behavior, being the main drivers for network demands. NC3A has therefore developed a traffic monitoring and analysis platform (TMAP). TMAP monitors IP traffic in a non-intrusive manner on a per packet basis, and can capture and store packet details for thorough off-line analysis. The non-intrusive behavior of TMAP is crucial, as NATO networks carry mission critical traffic that must not be interfered or tampered with. Finally, the paper provides results and analysis of a TMAP measurement campaign, conducted on an experimental CIS network, carrying the mission critical traffic during a NATO exercise.