TStat: TCP STatistic and Analysis Tool

Internet traffic analysis is one of the core topics of research in the evolution and planning of the next generation integrated networks. In spite of this fact, standard, open source tools for the collection and, most of all, the elaboration of traffic data are very few and far from comprehensive and easy to use. This paper present a new tool named Tstat, that allows the collection of traffic data and is able to reconstruct the traffic characteristics at several different logical level, from the packet level up to the application level. Tstat is made available to the scientific and industrial community 1 and, as of today, offer more than 80 different types of measurements, starting from classical traffic volume measurements, up to sophisticated analysis regarding the round trip times measured by TCP or the loss probability and correlation of each flow. One of the key characteristics of Tstat is that, though it is capable of analyzing the traffic at the flow level, it is an entirely passive tool, that does not alter in any way the traffic pattern at the network interface where its data collection module is installed.