Adaptive Statistical Optimization Techniques for Firewall Packet Filtering

— Packet filtering plays a critical role in the performance of many network devices such as firewalls, IPSec gateways, DiffServ and QoS routers. A tremendous amount of research was proposed to optimize packet filters. However, most of the related works use deterministic techniques and do not exploit the traffic characteristics in their optimization schemes. In addition, most packet classifiers give no specific consideration for optimizing packet rejection, which is important for many filtering devices like firewalls. Our contribution in this paper is twofold. First, we present a novel algorithm for maximizing early rejection of unwanted flows without impacting other flows significantly. Second, we present a new packet filtering optimization technique that uses adaptive statistical search trees to utilize important traffic characteristics and minimize the average packet matching time. The proposed techniques timely adapt to changes in the traffic conditions by performing...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Hazem Hamed, Adel El-Atawy, Ehab Al-Shaer
• Keywords: Communications, INFOCOM 2006, Packet Rejection, Packet filtering Optimization, Packet filtering Plays