Performance Evaluation of PNtMS: A Portable Network Traffic Monitoring System on Embedded Linux Platform

The principal role of embedded software is the transformation of data and the interaction with the physical world stimulus. The main concern in developing embedded software for network application is the lack of published best practice software architecture for optimizing performance by means of reducing protocol processing overhead, memory usage, and power consumption. This paper presents the implementation, operation and performance evaluation of the portable network traffic monitoring system (PNtMS) on an embedded Linux platform. The system has been designed to capture network packets information from the network and performs some statistical analysis, which includes providing data on the volume and types of traffic transferred within a LAN, traffic generated per node, number of traffic going through or coming from a system or application which is causing bottleneck, and the level of peak traffic. These data are then stored into the log files, and the traffic information can be shown through Web browser or onboard LCD. Result shows that PNtMS is performing at par with an existing network protocol analyzer with minimal usage of RAM ( 578 KB), low end processor (133 MHz) and storage(less than 1 GB).