nMASE - A Search Engine for Network Trace

Computer networks have been largely adopted in small and big settings in corporate and residential environments. With explosion of mobile traffic and ever increasing use of software defined networking, network traffic monitoring holds a key position in detecting network errors and security failures. Monitoring big networks has become a herculean task with having to deal with huge magnitude of data which is prohibitive for proper leverage considering the time and space required to exploit it. Much of the current work in this domain is focused on techniques to efficiently analyze and classify network traffic. Rule based classification or filtering of traffic is the first major step in any analysis procedure so that analysis is performed on focused set of packets. However defining, constructing and application of such rules involve considerable level of difficulty. In this paper we address this issue. We believe that searching for relevant content in network trace should be as easy as searching for relevant web pages through search engine. In this paper we touch upon this much neglected area by introducing concept of network search engine and ranking of network traffic. nMASE- A Search Engine for Network Trace is built upon Boolean model of information retrieval and is capable of finding relevant content from a huge network trace based on simple natural language queries. This leads to significant reduction in the time that network administrators spend in scanning through colossal network activity.