Capturing Network Traffic with a MAGNeT ¹

Current monitoring tools capture 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 cannot record true application-traffic demands and cannot capture protocol-state information at run-time in order to help fine-tune network performance. They also lend no insight into the modulating behavior of protocols (e.g., TCP) that have been shown to impact network performance.

In this paper, we introduce MAGNeT -- Monitor for Application-Generated Network Traffic. MAGNeT consists of both Linux kernel modifications and user-application programs. In addition to describing the implementation of MAGNeT, we evaluate its performance and its potential use in applications such as network security, protocol tuning and troubleshooting, and traffic characterization.