Channel Merging

The ability to establish a time sequence of the network traffic between different network links is often vital in order to analyze network or application behavior.

Therefore, all Napatech Network Adapters have physical network connections in pairs of two in order to monitor full duplex (Tx and Rx) traffic on a network connection at the same time.

For correlation analysis, delivering the frames to the host application in separate server buffers may not be desirable. Often, the host application needs to arrange the frames in the incoming sequence either per flow, per application type, or by other criteria, which is very time-consuming for the host CPU.

All Napatech Network Adapters feature a Channel Merging functionality on the adapter, thereby off-loading the host CPU. The Channel Merging functionality correctly merges the frames from selected physical ports in time sequence order, based on the high-precision time stamp provided by the adapter.

Furthermore, having Channel Merging on the adapter opens up a number of other features for arranging and splitting up the merged packet stream into server buffers in the way best suited to the application and the number of CPUs available.