The Internet Traffic Archive (ITA) [DMPS95] was created in 1995 by Danzig et al. to promote research on network analysis. ITA has several traces studied in published papers as well as unstudied traces. ITA is an important step towards open traffic data sets because research based on open data sets can be confirmed or further analyzed by someone else, which leads to deeper studies.
There are several different formats in the ITA archives but the majority of the available traces are in the tcpdump ascii output format. A set of shell scripts, called sanitize, are written by Paxson and used to scramble addresses in the tcpdump ascii output format to provide anonymity to network users.
Our traffic repository was motivated in part by the effort at ITA. We employ automatic traffic sampling at regular intervals since the archives at ITA are not updated much. We also thought that the tcpdump raw format is preferable to the ascii format because the raw format has more information, and powerful tools are available to manipulate the raw format. Also, it would be useful for developers of tools which handle traces in the tcpdump raw format.