Multigigabit Traffic Measurement Techniques in Support of Next Generation Internet

Measuring the traffic flowing through a data network is one of the most challenging tasks for researchers, network operators, product developers, simple users and so on. When one of these figures approaches the problem of knowing something about his or her network, a lot of technical question arise: what to measure, how to measure, with what accuracy, etc.. Soon, the need of deeply knowing the inner architecture of the network becomes evident along with the necessity to acquire suitable expensive instrumentation. Network traffic measurement is a wide and complex field which shares its arguments with many other fields such as network architectures, switching architectures, network management, operating systems, mathematics, etc.. The present work firstly tries to outline an high level description of this wide argument, exposing the connections with some other research fields in the telecommunication landscape. Subsequently, a series of research problems and aspects are deeply presented along with some solution proposals.