DEC-PKT

Description

These traces each contain an hour's worth of all wide-area traffic between Digital Equipment Corporation and the rest of the world.

Format

The traces were reduced from tcpdump format to ASCII using the sanitize scripts. (They actually used an earlier version of those scripts. If you encounter peculiarities, send email to Vern Paxson [vern@ee.lbl.gov].) They each include five files:

dec-pkt-n.tcp	TCP packets
dec-pkt-n.sf	TCP SYN/FIN/RST packets
dec-pkt-n.udp	UDP packets
dec-pkt-n.encap	Encapsulated IP - MBone
dec-pkt-n.other	Whatever else was in the trace

Measurement

A summary of the trace contents:

Trace	Start Time	Packets	Drops
dec-pkt-1	22:00, Wed March 8th, 1995	3.3 million	none
dec-pkt-2	02:00, Thu March 9th, 1995	3.9 million	none
dec-pkt-3	10:00, Thu March 9th, 1995	4.3 million	10 packets
dec-pkt-4	14:00, Thu March 9th, 1995	5.7 million	1,488 packets

All times are Pacific Standard Time. The traces were gathered at Digital's primary Internet access point, which is an Ethernet DMZ network operated by Digital's Palo Alto research groups. The raw traces were made using tcpdump on a DEC Alpha running Digital's OSF/1 operating system, which includes a kernel filter with capabilities comparable to those of BPF. Timestamps have millisecond precision, even though they are reported using six digits past the decimal. Timestamps a few microseconds apart were simultaneously timestamped by the kernel.

Privacy

The traces have been "sanitized" using the sanitize scripts. This means that the host IP addresses have been renumbered, and all packet contents removed.

Acknowledgements

The traces were made by Jeff Mogul (mogul@pa.dec.com) of Digital's Western Research Lab (WRL). Any use of these traces should explicitly credit Digital Equipment Corporation.

Publications

The traces correspond to DEC-WRL-1 through DEC-WRL-4 in Wide-Area Traffic: The Failure of Poisson Modeling, V. Paxson and S. Floyd, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 3(3), pp. 226-244, June 1995.

Related traces

LBL-PKT , LBL-TCP-3 .

Restrictions

The traces may be freely redistributed.

Distribution

Available from the Archive in compressed tar format: dec-pkt-1, 27 MB compressed, 94 MB uncompressed; dec-pkt-2, 32/113 MB; dec-pkt-3, 39/128 MB; and dec-pkt-4, 48/167 MB.