Implementing A Prototype For The Deep Packet Inspection As A Service Framework

Today, most of the network traffic need to traverse through several middleboxes before it can reach its destination. Common operation between the many of these middlebox is DPI – Deep Packet Inspection, which allows to perform different actions based on patterns in the packets content.
DPI consumes many of the middlebox resources during its operation. In addition, each packet usually traverses several middleboxes which causes the same packet to be scanned by different DPI engines over and over again. As a result the network becomes less efficient, which affects directly its total bandwidth.
One solution for those issues is a system that provide DPI as service. Means, the different middleboxes in the network that need DPI, can register to the service and expose their desired patterns. The System will direct the packets to a designated DPI engine instances across the network and pass the pattern matches, if exists, to the relevant middlebox.
There are many advantages in such system, among others: a single scan of every packet, the ability to upgrade to latest DPI algorithms, better partition of packets between DPI engines and increasing middlebox development innovation. Developing such a system is more simple today than ever with the emerging of SDN, which allows dynamic routing of the network traffic using a centralized controller.
The goal of this work is to implement a prototype of the DPI as a service system and to provide a realistic as possible environment to evaluate it. This paper documents the design and implementation of the system and other tools which are needed to deploy functioning network that uses this system.
Finally, the paper describes the experiments done to prove the system correctness and effectiveness and discusses their results.