This trace set is also known as Abilene I.

This is a continuous 2 hour bidirectional packet trace set taken from the Indianapolis router node on the Abilene network. Two OC48c links were measured: the link to Cleveland (CLEV) and the link to Kansas City (KSCY). The captures were performed using DAG 4.23 cards.

Each trace file is named using the following format: IPLS-[link]-yyyymmdd-HHMMSS-[direction].gz. The link describes the link that was measured by the trace, either CLEV or KSCY. The time and date refers to the local time when the capture was started. The direction refers to which half of the link is contained within 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. It is not clear how this anonymisation was performed, however. It appears that the mapping database was preserved across the entire trace set.

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

Important note: The old NLANR page about this trace set suggests that there may be a bug with the wire length recorded for the packets in these traces, resulting in values that are incorrect by small amounts. As it is not clear whether this was resolved, please avoid relying on the wire length for any analysis performed using these traces.

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.