Network monitoring system based on an FPGA with Linux

The distributed computing, mobile computing, and collaborative systems paradigms have induced an increasing interconnection of computing systems using communication networks. Allowing access to multiple mobile devices to a communication network has created the need to design autonomous applications, with a low energy consumption, able to monitor and to create statistics about the bandwidth consumption, as well as to detect suspicious activities, in order to keep a trustable communication between devices. This work describes the creation of a network monitoring system on an FPGA running Linux, using the SNMPv2 protocol to manage the devices that are connected to the network. The SNMP agents are executed as Linux applications and they store the information on a relational database using the SQLite manager. The system shows that it is possible to create an embedded application with support for relational databases in order to store the information about the use of the communication network and, hence, to be able to perform several network security and traffic analysis.