The definition of a flow is relatively fluid, and Napatech provides support for many variants.
Flow definitions
A flow can be described by any of these definitions:
- A sequence of packets from a source to a destination (host, multicast group or broadcast domain)
- An artificial, logical equivalent to a call or connection
- A sequence of packets sent from a particular source to a particular unicast, anycast or multicast destination that the source desires to label as a flow. A flow can consist of all packets in a specific transport connection or media stream. A flow is not necessarily mapped 1-to-1 to a transport connection
- A set of IP packets passing an observation point in the network during a certain time interval
Flow examples
Napatech stateful flow management supports flows that are
defined in many ways, including subsets and groups of flows. These are examples of some of
the supported flows:
- 5-tuple flow (source IP, destination IP, source port, destination port, protocol are the most common parameters for flow identification) or similar (4-tuple, 2-tuple)
- Subset of a flow (for example, 5-tuple/2-tuple and VLAN tag)
- Groups of flows (for example, layer-2 flow: All packets between two MAC addresses)
This is an example of a 5-tuple flow:
This is an example of an alternative flow: