This trace set is also known as Abilene III.

This is a (mostly) contiguous passive trace set taken the Indianapolis router node on the Abilene network, instrumenting the 10 Gigabit backbone. This particular trace set measures an OC192c Packet-over-SONET link towards Kansas City (KSCY) using a DAG 6.1 capture card.

When processing the traces to generate data for these webpages, we found that two of the traces appeared to be corrupted, i.e. invalid values were present in important fields such as the capture length or link type. As a result, we have truncated those traces at the point where we encountered the corrupt packet. It is not clear where the corruption has arisen from - there is no documentation to suggest that the traces were previously damaged. The original copies of the truncated traces have been placed in the archive/ directory on the FTP server. However, this does mean that the trace set is not completely contiguous.

Each trace file is named using the following format: yyyymmdd-HHMMSS-[direction].gz. The time and date refers to the local time when the capture was started. The direction refers to which half of the link is recorded in the trace. Direction 0 is westbound and direction 1 is eastbound.

The IP addresses in the traces have been replaced using a one-to-one mapping into the 10.0.0.0/8 address space. Each anonymised address is assigned sequentially so the first real-world address observed is mapped to 10.0.0.1, the next new address is 10.0.0.2 and so on. The mapping database is preserved across the entire trace set as far as we can tell.

Checksums have been replaced with zeroes in each packet and any retained payload following the transport header has also been zeroed.

The recommended method for processing these traces is to use Libtrace, which we have developed. There are a number of tools included with libtrace such as a packet dumping utility, a trace format converter (for example, to convert to pcap), a trace splitting/filtering tool and a few statistic generators. We suggest you examine the Libtrace Wiki for more details on the Libtrace tools and the library itself.

Acknowledgements: Some of the information presented on this page has bee sourced from the old NLANR page about this traceset.