NZIX-II trace archive

The NZIX-II data set is a collection of long GPS-syncronized IP header traces captured by the WAND research group with a DAG3.2E system at the New Zealand Internet Exchange hosted by the ITS department at the University of Waikato.

Traces online

Trace
(click for graphs)
Run length Size (gzip) Download http Download ftp MD5 checksum
20000705-152900 02:30:59 853MB 0705-1529.gz 0705-1529.gz 8496ba564ae24bae740a8fb86239a558
20000705-180000 06:00:00 1482MB 0705-1800.gz 0705-1800.gz 379edc3e8ef60ecc65569b974dd7bec7
20000706-000000 06:00:00 587MB 0706-0000.gz 0706-0000.gz ca6cd20a0f01cfd56e3b7b32c4d9c9c9
20000706-060000 06:00:00 1197MB 0706-0600.gz 0706-0600.gz 187387b6fb4a2b48fc674ea524d493e0
20000706-120000 06:00:00 2013MB 0706-1200.gz 0706-1200.gz 56b093510c6a943a3c530e86aa084fda
20000706-180000 06:00:00 1473MB 0706-1800.gz 0706-1800.gz 7e95368bcb48ad2d5077aeae2ee6c467
20000707-000000 06:00:00 581MB 0707-0000.gz 0707-0000.gz a8248110418b17b7fa2796eab4119d2b
20000707-060000 06:00:00 1151MB 0707-0600.gz 0707-0600.gz 19e9a8fc137e0181f241438fe81d3e5a
20000707-120000 06:00:00 1883MB 0707-1200.gz 0707-1200.gz 13341ee5286d83def47355050bb045c2
20000707-180000 06:00:00 1365MB 0707-1800.gz 0707-1800.gz 900120ab9692814ccf451e6f981e55bc
20000708-000000 06:00:00 613MB 0708-0000.gz 0708-0000.gz 17358b5c636f4a1d7447697aebd4cf62
20000708-060000 06:00:00 698MB 0708-0600.gz 0708-0600.gz 33373a9fcaa091a29295ebdc4c09521e
20000708-120000 06:00:00 1221MB 0708-1200.gz 0708-1200.gz 9ba20b27e60a1e0f687d2ce6d6588441
20000708-180000 06:00:00 1149MB 0708-1800.gz 0708-1800.gz ad308401f447774ba16e0d46d6aabfc2
20000709-000000 06:00:00 531MB 0709-0000.gz 0709-0000.gz a7ffefa7b877575d17aaa6886074510c
20000709-060000 06:00:00 637MB 0709-0600.gz 0709-0600.gz 1cc5ce5eb38586ef13aea9ad18b913f8
20000709-120000 06:00:00 1223MB 0709-1200.gz 0709-1200.gz f0f43e8742414106dae94976a1f04c13
20000709-180000 06:00:00 1337MB 0709-1800.gz 0709-1800.gz 768e09f7c226d71e829a3e0f905fb375
20000710-000000 06:00:00 475MB 0710-0000.gz 0710-0000.gz 8e97e56fd4a80d8f4b9c57f70d1dd540
20000710-060000 06:00:00 1230MB 0710-0600.gz 0710-0600.gz d7330816f488cbda0f2072cf19b15e6e
20000710-120000 02:56:27 990MB 0710-1200.gz 0710-1200.gz 2350c2bd9752b4a5aa0059cbe1f0951d

When downloading the traces, please read the disclaimers. When using these traces for research and publications, please give appropriate credits for the NZIX-II data set towards NLANR MOAT and the WAND research group. The WAND group wishes to thank Dennis Su of Waikato's ITS for the support of this measurement point.

The traces are in DAG format, which currently is a fixed 64 bytes record format with 40 bytes of IP header (usually covering most, if not all, of the TCP/IP and UDP/IP headers). To start off, a simple ASCII converter is in d3h2asc.pl, although the timestamp output is inaccurate. This is just in case you need something to get started.

For more sophisticated analysis we recommend using the dagtools package available from the DAG software website. The tool dagdump is a simple converter into ASCII and serves as a good starting point when you wish to import DAG traces into a toolset of your own. Also, CAIDA's CoralReef package should have support for native DAG traces shortly.

About this measurement point

At the time of the capture, NZIX served as a peering point among a number of major New Zealand ISP's:

NZIX consists of two Cisco 2926 26 port 10/100 autosensing Ethernet switches running spanning tree for redundancy. Each ISP has their own WAN circuits back to their respective locations (Auckland or Wellington).

The DAG monitor is connected to a Switched Port Analyzer (SPAN) port via 100BaseTX FastEthernet. Consequently, timestamps are skewed compared to their arrival or departure times at the input/output ports of the switch as the total capacity of the switch is higher than the monitoring uplink and packets arriving from different ports at the same time need to be queued (or dropped) before being delivered to the SPAN port. It is actually possible that traffic gets lost before being monitored, but we estimate that this chance is fairly low as the total bandwidth at the switch currently peaks at around 10-12 MBits/sec. Further analysis of the trace files may reveal more detailed information about the behaviour of the monitor configuration.

About the measurement procedure

The collection is dominated by a contiguous 5-day trace starting on Wednesday 5th of July (in the list shown as 11 individual trace files), with a total size of 24GB/59GB (compressed, uncompressed) and containing approximately 843 million IP headers.

Traces are in DAG standard format (see Section 11, p.11 of the DAG Installation Guide. Trace records are of 64 bytes fixed length, containing full TCP/IP and UDP/IP headers in most cases. The original packet length has been preserved as part of the overhead in the DAG trace record. The traces have been sanitized for IP addresses in a non-reversible fashion and all non-(ICMP/UDP/TCP) traffic has been discarded. The amount of background traffic is known to be non-zero, but low most of the time.

Processing of the traces can be done with the forthcoming dagtools package available from the DAG software website.

Papers and publications related to this data set

Jörg Micheel, Ian Graham, Nevil Brownlee: The Auckland data set: an access link observed, submitted paper to the 14th ITC Specialist Seminar on Access Networks and Systems, April 25th-27th, 2001, Barcelona, Spain.

H Stele Martin, Anthony J McGregor, John G Cleary: Analysis of Internet Delay Times, Proceedings of the First Passive and Active Measurement Workshop, PAM2000, April 3rd-4th 2000, Hamilton, New Zealand, p.141ff.

Sarah K Joyce: Traffic on the Internet - A Study of Internet Games Traffic, BCMS 420 Honours project report, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand, 2000.

Darryl Veitch, Lidong Huang, EMUlab, University of Melbourne, and Patrice Abry, Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon, Laboratoire de Physique: Studies of Long Range Dependencies and Self-Similiarity in Internet traffic patterns using Wavelet analysis. Darryl Veitch's home page.

If you are about to write a paper using the above data set, please kindly let us know.

Further information

The main home for this data set is at the WAND research group. Graphs include packets, bandwidth and new connections per each trace. The pointers are:

	http://wand.cs.waikato.ac.nz/wand/wits/
	http://wand.cs.waikato.ac.nz/wand/wits/nzix/2/

The traces online here are the files comprising the continous 5 days trace.


Comments, questions or suggestion can be made via the feedback form. Last update: October 10th, 2001. Jörg Micheel.