<span lang="en">This document describes several design proposals to enhance network sensor performance on multiprocessor architectures. Our main contributions are related to the design of an autonomous sensor and to the idea of performing some parallelization of the analysis. These proposals can be implemented in network sensors such as intrusion detection systems, network antivirus appliances, QoS monitors and any other device based on network traffic analysing. Taking a certain model of traffic analysis as our starting point, we look deeply into some design proposals to address the difficulties involved in the parallelization. In this work, we propose a series of resources that can help us to solve these difficulties. Later, we study the prototypes developed in order to test different design alternatives and, finally, present selected case studies. We finish by quantitatively analysing the results to validate our design proposals.</span>