Experiences with a Continuous Network Tracing Infrastructure

Alefiya Hussain, Genevieve Bartlett, Yuri Pryadkin, John Heidemann, Christos Papadopoulos, and Joseph Bannister
USC/Information Sciences Institute

Abstract

One of the most pressing problems in network research is the lack of long-term trace data from ISPs. The Internet carries an enormous volume and variety of data; mining this data can provide valuable insight into the design and development of new protocols and applications. Although capture cards for high-speed links exist today, actually making the network traffic available for analysis involves more than just getting the packets off the wire, but also handling large and variable traffic loads, sanitizing and anonymizing the data, and coordinating access by multiple users. In this paper we discuss the requirements, challenges, and design of an effective traffic monitoring infrastructure for network research. We describe our experience in deploying and maintaining a multi-user system for continuous trace collection at a large regional ISP. We evaluate the performance of our system and show that it can support sustained collection and processing rates of over 160-300Mbits/s.

Availability

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Reference

Hussain05b
Alefiya Hussain, Genevieve Bartlett, Yuri Pryadkin, John Heidemann, Christos Papadopoulos, and Joseph Bannister. Experiences with a Continuous Network Tracing Infrastructure. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM MineNet Workshop , pp. 185-190. Philadelphia, PA, USA, ACM. August, 2005. <http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Hussain05b.html>.
@inproceedings{Hussain05b,
	author = "Alefiya Hussain and Genevieve Bartlett and Yuri Pryadkin and John Heidemann and Christos Papadopoulos and Joseph Bannister",
	title = "Experiences with a Continuous Network Tracing Infrastructure",
	booktitle = "Proceedings of the  {ACM} SIGCOMM MineNet Workshop ",
	year = "2005",
	publisher = "{ACM}",
	address = "Philadelphia, PA, USA",
	month = "August",
	pages = "185--190",
	keywords = "network trace collection",
	url = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Hussain05b.html",
	pdfurl = "http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/PAPERS/Hussain05b.pdf",
	myorganization = "USC/Information Sciences Institute",
	copyrightholder = "{ACM}",
}

Copyright

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