The USC Wireless LAN Traces

Please note below the terms for using USC traces. You must agree to these terms.

  1. While we have made effort to avoid errors in the process of collecting and manipulating the traces, we cannot guarantee complete correctness in both the traces and codes used. The users of the traces and codes should be aware that we do not guarantee the traces or codes are free of bugs, and assume some risks if you use them 'as is'.
  2. Any futher work derived from the trace data should not make the MAC addresses visible in plain text. Instead, please use self-defined IDs to identify individual nodes if you have to do so in the work.

(A) Raw traces:

The trace was collected between Apr. 19, 2005 and Aug. 8, 2005.
On Aug. 9, 2005 we stopped collecting the trace due to changes in our campus network, and we will resume trace collection after these changes.
A more detailed description of the trace content and format is available here
  1. Session traces: These traces are logs for timestamps of (start|stop) of VPN sessions. at USC, wireless users must establish connections to a VPN server before they can use the network. Hence the session log contains periods of users potentailly using the network, with its private (dynamic) IP addresses.
    Download from here, 2.9MB tgz file.

  2. DHCP log: The DHCP log contains the private IP assignments to MAC addresses.
    Download from here, 5.6MB tgz file.

  3. Traps: The trap log contains the (switch port, MAC address) association when the user is online. However, if a MAC re-appears at the same switch port when it was last online, the trap log may NOT record this information. Hence trap logmust be used in conjunction with session log to discover all association sessions.
    Download from here, 1.3MB tgz file.
    The mapping between switch (IP, port) and the building code of USC campus is available here. USC campus map is available through university website.

    4. An earlier data of trap records for approximately one and a third years (from Dec. 23, 2003 to Apr. 17, 2005) period is available here (tgz file, 7.8MB).
    WARNING: The trap log alone does NOT contain all user online events! If a user comes online at the same switch port repeatedly, it does NOT create separate trap log for each new online event. Also, the trap log only records the online epoch, but not online duration information of any kind. There is a hole in this data from Sep. 28, 2004 to Oct. 18, 2004.

  4. Flow size log: The log of data flows size (in KB) and its source/destination IP address/port. Due to the size of this data (hundreds of MB per day) it cannot be available online. Please contact us if you are interested in this data.

(B) Processed traces:

From the above raw traces it is possible to find out user locations (at per switch port granularity, which roughly corresponds to buildings on campus) when they are online.
We have such processed trace for the time period of Apr. 20, 2005 to May. 19, 2005. This is the trace we used in the USC tech report currently under submission.
The processed trace is available here (tgz file, 838KB).

A longer processed trace for the whole summer 2005 is also available here (tgz file, 1.4MB). Please note that the summer vacation is from mid-May to mid-Aug for USC, and the WLAN activity significantly reduced during the summer vacation. The program code we used for trace processing is also available here with a rough memo about the procedures of obtaining the processed duration trace from the raw trace.

** NEW ** A processed trace for Spring 2006 semester is now available here (tgz file, 22.5MB). This data set contains 25,481 users that appeared during Jan. 25, 2006 to Apr. 28, 2006. During this time frame, there were 137 unique locations in the trace. Each location roughly corresponds to a building on campus, and it is encoded in the format of IP_port (the actual switch port that controls traffic to/from this location). More details about the trace format can be found here , and details about the trace processing can be found here.
This wabsite is maintained by Wei-jen Hsu (wjhsu@ufl.edu). Last updated: Jul. 24, 2008