Preliminary development of an inexpensive and portable network monitoring probe using an internet embedded microprocessor

Management of a telecommunication network involves the requirement to monitor and manage devices on local and wide area networks (for optical, wired and wireless). Devices used to perform this function are referred to as Remote Monitoring devices or network probes. This paper investigates the prototyping of a network probe which uses an embedded internet microprocessor to collect and send data to a network monitor. The device uses the TINI Internet Interface developed by Dallas Semiconductor. This device was chosen as the ethernet driver has a promiscuous mode which potentially allows the capture of all packets sent on the ethernet connection of the embedded internet microprocessor. A prototype system of the Remote Network Monitoring System is developed which utilises Java based software for server and client on a personal computer and some preliminary results are presented. The client software was not implemented on the TINI due to problems associated with memory limitations of the chosen embedded internet processor, with the TINI only having simple functionality of packet capture demonstrated. Further hardware design requirements for the TINI board are needed to provide sufficient resources on the embedded processor to allow for effective packet capture and storage.