Toward highly reliable network traffic traces

Passive traffic collection is a good methodology to draw complete picture about network behavior. The collected traffic traces contain huge information for fully understanding the network characteristics, user behavior and network traffic engineering. These crucial activities should be supported with high fidelity traffic traces. This paper proposes a new approach for producing reliable traffic traces by monitoring the network interface as a first contact point in the traffic collection process, and provides a meta-data (meta-trace) report that is used to judge the reliability of the collected traffic trace in a post-processing phase. The proposed approach relies on monitoring the appropriated statistical indicators by directly consulting the Ethernet network interface card hardware. The conducted experiments prove the superiority of the proposed approach in producing error free, reliable and high fidelity traffic traces using commodity hardware and software under a limited budget.