MEHARI: a system for analysing the use of the internet services

Abstract This paper describes the MEHARI system for monitoring and analysing the traffic on National R&D Networks (NRN). The main design requirement of the MEHARI system was to cope with the main challenges currently faced by most of these networks: Service usage, charging schemes, network dimensioning and auditing procedures according to a given Acceptable Use Policy (AUP). The resulting MEHARI system consists of a low cost hardware traffic capture platform, and several traffic analysis software modules running on top of this platform. These modules can report information on the usage of the Internet services, the main traffic origin and destinations, etc. The MEHARI system has been tested by running a field trial on the Spanish NRN (RedIRIS). Some relevant data on the performance and efficiency of the system configuration used in the field trial is presented in this paper.