Monitoring and Analyzing Big Traffic Data of a Large-Scale Cellular Network with Hadoop

Network traffic monitoring and analysis is of theoretical and practical significance for optimizing network resource and improving user experience. However, existing solutions, which usually rely on a high-performance server with large storage capacity, are not scalable for detailed analysis of a large volume of traffic data. In this article, we present a traffic monitoring and analysis system for large-scale networks based on Hadoop, an open-source distributed computing platform for big data processing on commodity hardware. This system has been deployed in the core network of a large cellular network and extensively evaluated. The results demonstrate that the system can efficiently processes 4.2 Tbytes of traffic data from 123 Gb/s links with high performance and low cost every day.