Capturing network traffic with a MAGNeT
Jeffrey R. Hay, Wu-chun Feng, Mark K. Gardner · OSTI OAI (U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information) · 2001
Current network traffic trace generation tools are able to monitor network traffic as it appears on the network, but are incapable of capturing traffic as it progresses through a running protocol stack. Thus, the current generation of tools can not record true application traffic demands, and are incapable of capturing run-time protocol state information to help fine-tune network performance. They also lend no insi.ght into the modulating behavior of some protoco1.s (e.g., TCP), which has been shown to have significant impact on network performance. In this paper, we introduce the concept of a network application traffic trace generation tool. We discuss the need for such a tool, and the necessary modifications to the Linux kernel to enable such a tool. We also describe our own implementation, which we call the Monitor for Application-Generated Network Traffic (MAGNeT), and propose several ways in which MAGNeT can help increase network performance