García-Jiménez, SantiagoMagaña Lizarrondo, EduardoAracil Rico, Javier2021-01-112021-01-112020S. Garcia-Jimenez, E. Magaña and J. Aracil, 'NATRA: Network ACK-Based Traffic Reduction Algorithm,' in IEEE Access, vol. 8, pp. 151229-151241, 2020, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2997669.2169-353610.1109/ACCESS.2020.2997669https://academica-e.unavarra.es/handle/2454/38983Traffic monitoring involves packet capturing and processing at a very high rate of packets per second. Typically, flow records are generated from the packet traffic, such as TCP flow records that feature the number of bytes and packets in each direction, flow duration, number of different ports, and other metrics. Delivering such flow records, about network traffic flowing at tens of Gbps is rather challenging in terms of processing power. To address this problem, traffic thinning can be applied to reduce the input load, by swiftly discarding useless packets at the sniffer NIC or driver level, which effectively reduces the load on software layers that handle traffic processing. This work proposes an algorithm that drops empty ACK packets from TCP traffic, thus achieving a significant reduction in the packets per second that must be handled by each traffic module. The tests discussed below show that the algorithm achieves a 25% decrease in the packets per second rate with minimal information loss.13 p.application/pdfengThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.Network traffic thinningTraffic processingSniffer architectureinfo:eu-repo/semantics/articleinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess