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

• https://github.com/m-lab/packet-headers

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:

• M-Lab Host Server - https://console.cloud.google.com/storage/browser/archive-measurement-lab/host/pcap/
• NDT - https://console.cloud.google.com/storage/browser/archive-measurement-lab/ndt/pcap/
• Neubot - https://console.cloud.google.com/storage/browser/archive-measurement-lab/neubot/pcap/
• WeHe- https://console.cloud.google.com/storage/browser/archive-measurement-lab/wehe/pcap/

Packet Header Data in BigQuery

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