Reliable Network Traffic Collection for Network Characterization and User Behavior

This paper presents a reliable and complete traffic collection facility as a first and crucial step toward accurate traffic analysis for network characterization and user behavior. The key contribution is to produce an accurate, reliable and high fidelity traffic traces as the valuable source of information in the passive traffic ananlysis approach. In order to guarantee the traces reliability, we first detect the bottlenecks of the collection facility, and then propose different monitoring probes starting from the ethernet network interface and ending at the packet trace. The proposed facility can run without stop for long time instead of one-shot periods, therefore, it can be used to draw a complete picture of network traffic that fully characterize the network and user behavior. The laboratory experiments conclude that the system is highly reliable, stable and produces reliable traces attached with different statistics reports that come from the installed monitoring probes.