Packet-level traffic measurements from the Sprint IP backbone

Network traffic measurements provide essential data for networking research and network management. In this article we describe a passive monitoring system designed to capture GPS synchronized packet-level traffic measurements on OC-3, OC-12, and OC-48 links. Our system is deployed in four POP in the Sprint IP backbone. Measurement data is stored on a 10 Tbyte storage area network and analyzed on a computing cluster. We present a set of results to both demonstrate the strength of the system and identify recent changes in Internet traffic characteristics. The results include traffic workload, analyses of TCP flow round-trip times, out-of-sequence packet rates, and packet delay. We also show that some links no longer carry Web traffic as their dominant component to the benefit of file sharing and media streaming. On most links we monitored, TCP flows exhibit low out-of-sequence packet rates, and backbone delays are dominated by the speed of light.