Packet Header Service (PCAP)

The M-Lab packet-headers service provides a binary which collects packet headers for all incoming TCP flows and saves each stream of packet captures into a per-stream .pcap file where the filename is the UUID of the TCP flow. It only saves the packet headers, and it supports (with a command-line flag) IP anonymity for the saved addresses.

M-Lab uses TCP INFO to collect statistics about every TCP connection used by each hosted measurement service running on the M-Lab platform. TCP INFO runs as a “side” addition to other tools, taking advantage of TCP connections generated by incoming tests to M-Lab.

Source code for M-Lab’s Packet Header Service

Citing the M-Lab Packet Header Service Dataset

Please cite this data set as follows: **The M-Lab Packet Header Data Set, <date range used>. https://measurementlab.net/tests/tcp-info/pcap

Packet Header Data in Raw Format

Data collected by the Packet Header service is available in raw format in Google Cloud Storage for each hosted measurement service:

Packet Header Data in BigQuery

M-Lab does not publish Packet Header data in BigQuery.

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