Loss Analysis of the Software-based Packet Capturing

Gigabit per second and higher bandwidths imply greater challenge to perform lossless packet capturing on generic PC architectures. This is because of software based capture solutions, which did not improve as fast as network bandwidth and they still heavily rely on the OS's packet processing mechanism. There are hardware and operating system factors that primarily affect capture performance. This paper summarizes these parameters and shows how to predict packet loss ratio during the capture process